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A LAST DIARY 



BT THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE JOURNAL OF A 
DISAPPOINTED MAN 
Fifth impression. Crown 8vo, 
63. net. 

ENJOYING LIFE 
AND OTHER LITERARY 

REMAINS. Third impres- 
sion. Crown 8vo. 6s, net. 



A Last Diary 



BY W. N. P. BARBELLION .^^^t^ 

WITH A PREFACE BY 
ARTHUR J. CUMMINGS 



d^ 



" We are in the power of no calamity while 
Death is in our own." — Religio Medici. 



NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



<7f<^?"! 






'^\^fl'^ 



0ift 



A II rights reserved 



THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF 
BARBELLION 

The opening entry in A Last Dim^y was 
made on March 21, 1918; the closing 
sentence was written on June 3, 1919. In 
The Journal of a Disappointed Man the 
record ended on October 21, 1917, with the 
one word " Self-disgust." An important 
difference between the first diary and that 
now pubhshed Ues in the fact that the first 
embodies a carefully selected series of 
extracts from twenty post-quarto volumes 
of manuscript in which Barbellion had 
recorded his thoughts and his observations 
from the age of thirteen without any clearly 
defined intention, except towards the end of 
his life, of discovering them to any but one 
or two of his intimate friends. He often 
hinted to me that some parts of his diary 
would " make good reading " if they could 
be printed in essay form, and I think he 
then had in mind chiefly those passages which 



vi LIFE AND CHARACTER 

supplied the inspiration of Enjoying Life, \ 
the volume of essays that revealed him more 
distinctively in the character of " a naturalist 
and a man of letters." Still, the diary was 
primarily written for himself. It was his 
means of self-expression, the secret chamber 
of his soul into which no other person, how- 
ever deep in his love and confidence, might 
penetrate. More than once I asked him to 
let me look at those parts which he thought 
suitable for publication, but shyly he turned 
aside the suggestion with the remark : "Some 
day, perhaps, but not now." All I ever saw 
was a part of the first essay in Enjoying 
Life, and an account of his wanderings " in 
a spirit of burning exultation " over the great 
stretch of sandy " burrows " at the estuary 
of that beautiful Devonshire river, the Taw, 
where in long days of solitude he first taught 
himself with the zeal and patience of the 
born naturalist the ways of birds and fish 
and insects, and learnt to love the sweet 
harmony of the sunlight and the flowers ; 
where, too, as a mere boy he first meditated 
upon the mysteries of life and death. 



OF BARBELLION vii 

The earlier Journal, then, was, generally- 
speaking, spontaneous, not calculated for 
effect, a part of himself He wrote down in- 
stinctively and by habit his inmost thoughts, 
his lightest impression of the doings of the 
day, a careless jest that amused him, an irri- 
tating encounter with a foolish or a stupid 
person, something newly seen in the structure 
of a bird's wing, a sunset effect. It was only 
on rare occasions that he deliberately experi- 
mented with forms of expression. But I 
cannot help thinking that the diary contained 
in the present volume, though in one sense 
equally a part of himself, has a somewhat 
different quality. It appears to bear internal 
evidence of havdng been written with an eye 
to the reader because of his settled intention 
that it should be published in a book. He 
has drawn upon the memories of his youth 
for many of the most interesting passages. 
He has smoothed the rough edges of his 
style with the loving care of an author 
anticipating criticism, and anxious to do his 
best. Whether the last diary will be found 
less attractive on that account is not for me 



viii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

to say. The circumstances in which it was 
written explain the difference, if, as I suppose, 
it is easy to detect. In the earher period 
covered by A Last Diary the original 
Journal was actually in the press ; in the 
later period it had been published and 
received with general goodwill. Barbellion 
certainly did not expect to live to see the 
Journal in print, and that is why he inserted 
at the end its single false entry, " Barbellion 
died on December 31 "—1917. A few of 
the later reviewers, whose sense of propriety 
was offended by this " twisting of the truth 
for the sake of an artistic finish," rebuked 
him for the trick played upon his readers. 
But he refused to take the rebuke seriously. 
" The fact is," he said with a whimsical smile, 
" no man dare remain alive after writing such 
a book." 

A further difference between the present 
book and its two predecessors is that both 
the Jour7ial and Enjoying Life were pre- 
pared by himself for publication, though the 
latter appeared after his death, whereas A 
Last Diary was still in manuscript when 



OF BARBELLION ix 

he died. He left carefully written instruc- 
tions as to the details of publication, and he 
was extremely anxious that there should be 
no " bowdlerising " of any part of the text. 
He desired that at the end should be written 
" The rest is silence." Nearly the whole of 
the diary is in his own handwriting, which 
in the last entries became a scarcely legible 
scrawl, though in moments of exceptional 
physical weakness he dictated to his wife 
and sister. Up to the last his mind retained 
its extraordinary strength and vigour. His 
eyes never lost their curiously pathetic look 
of questioning "liveness." In that feeble 
form — " a badly articulated skeleton " he had 
called himself long before — his eyes were 
indeed the only feature left by which those 
who loved him could still keep recognition 
of his physical presence. His body was a 
gaunt, white framework of skin and bone, 
enclosing a spirit still so passionately alive 
that it threatened to burst asunder the frail 
bonds that imprisoned it. I think those 
who read the diary will agree that while it 
is mellower and more delicate in tone it 



X LIFE AND CHARACTER 

shows no sign of mental deterioration or of 
any decline in the quality and texture of his 
thoughts, certainly no failure in the power 
of literary expression. The very last long 
entry, written the day before he laid down 
his pen to write no more, is a little master- 
piece of joyous description, in which with 
the exact knowledge of the zoologist and 
the subtle sense of the artist, he gives reasons | 
why " the brightest thing in the world is a ! 
Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun." 
Mr. Edward Shanks, in an essay of singular 
understanding, has quoted this particular 
entry, a flashing remembrance of earlier days, 
as a characteristic example of those " ex- 
quisite descriptions of landscapes and living 
things which grow more vivid and more 
moving as the end approaches." The 
appreciation written by Mr. Shanks appeared 
in March of the present year in the London 
Mercury, which also published in successive 
numbers other extracts from the diary that 
is now given in extenso. With the help of 
my brother, H. R. Cummings, who has 
been responsible for most of the work in- 
volved in preparing the manuscript for the 



OF BARBELLION xi 

press, I have made a few verbal changes and 
corrections ; and certain passages have been 
omitted which, now that BarbeUion's identity 
is estabhshed, seem to refer too openly and 
too intimately to persons still alive. Other- 
wise the entries appear exactly as they were 
made. 

In recent months I have been asked by 
various persons, many of whom I do not 
know and have never seen, but who have 
been profoundly interested in the personality 
of Barbellion, to write a " straightforward " 
account of his life. Some of these corre- 
spondents seem to imagine that it holds a 
strange mystery not disclosed in the frank 
story of the Journal, while others suspect 
that the events of his career, as he recorded 
them, are a judicious blend of truth and 
fiction. I can only say as emphatically as 
possible that there is no mystery of any sort, 
and that the facts of his life are in close 
accordance with his own narrative. Obviously 
the disconnected diary form must be in- 
complete, and in some respects puzzling ; 
and clearly he selected for treatment in a 
book those entries of fact which were appro- 



xii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

priate to the scheme of his journal. They 
were chosen, as I have already indicated, 
from a great mass of material that accumu- 
lated from week to week over a period of 
about fifteen years. But they are neither 
invented nor deliberately coloured to suit 
his purpose. When he spoke of himself he 
spoke the truth as far as he knew it ; when 
he spoke of others he spoke the truth as far 
as he knew it ; when he spoke of actual 
events they had happened as nearly as 
possible as he related them. 

The accounts of his career, published at 
the time of his death last year, were accurate 
in their general outline. Bruce Frederick 
Cummings (Barbellion's real name) was born 
at the little town of Barnstaple in North 
Devon, on September 7, 1889. He was 
the youngest of a family of six — three boys 
and three girls. His father was a journalist 
who had achieved no mean reputation, local 
though it was, as a pungent political writer, 
and had created for himself what must have 
been, even in those days, a peculiar position 
for the district representative of a country 



OF BARBELLION xiii 

newspaper. He was a shrewd but kindly 
judge of men ; he had a quick wit, a facile pen, 
and an unusual charm of manner that made 
him a popular figure everywhere. In fact, 
in the area covered by his activities he exer- 
cised in his prime a personal influence 
unique of its kind, and such as would be 
scarcely possible under modern conditions of 
newspaper work. Though they had little 
in common temperamentally, there always 
existed a strong tie of affection between my 
father and Barbellion, and I believe there is 
to be found among the latter's still un- 
examined literary remains a sympathetic 
sketch of the personality of John Cummings. 
In his infancy Barbellion nearly died from 
an attack of pneumonia, and from that early 
illness, one is inclined to think, his subsequent 
ill-health originated. He was a puny, under- 
sized child, nervously shy, with a tiny white 
face and large brown melancholy eyes. He 
was so frail that he was rather unduly 
coddled, and was kept at home beyond the 
age at which the rest of us had been sent to 
school. I taught him in my father's office- 



xiv LIFE AND CHARACTER 

study to read and write, as well as the 
rudiments of English history and English 
literature, and a little Latin. Up to the age ' ^ 
of nine, when he started to attend a large 
private school in the town, he was slow of 
apprehension, but of an inquiring mind, and 
he rarely forgot what he had once learnt. 
He was nearly twelve years old before his 
faculties began to develop, and they developed 
rapidly. He revealed an aptitude for mathe- 
matics, and a really surprising gift of com- 
position ; some of his school essays, both in 
style and manner, and in the precocity ot 
their thought, might almost have been 
written by a mature man of letters. The 
headmaster of the school, who had been a 
Somersetshire County cricketer, and whose 
educational outlook was dominated by his 
sense of the value of sports and games, was 
a little disconcerted by this strange, shy boy 
and his queer and precise knowledge of out- 
of-the-way things, but he had the acumen 
to recognise his abilities and to predict for 
him a brilliant future. He read all kinds of 
books, from Kingsley to Carlyle, with an 



OF BARBELLION xv 

.nsatiable appetite. It was about this time, 
:oo, that he began those long tramps into 
:he countryside, over the hills to watch the 
staghounds meet, and along the broad river 
marshes, that provided the beginnings and 
the foundation of the diary habit, which 
became in time the very breath of his inner 
life. He loved the open air, and all that the 
open air meant. After hours of absence, 
we knew not where, he would return glowing 
with happy excitement at some adventure 
with a friendly fisherman, or at the identifi- 
cation of a rare bird. Even now the wonder 
of the world was gripping him in its bewitch- 
ing spell. In later days he expressed its 
power over him in words such as these, with 
many variations ; 

" Like a beautiful and terrible mistress, the world 
holds me its devoted slave. She flouts me, but I 
love her still. She is cruel, but still I love her. 
My love for her is a guilty love — for the voluptuous 
curves of the Devonshire moors, for the bland 
benignity of the sun smiling alike on the just and 
on the unjust, for the sea which washes in a 
beautiful shell or a corpse with the same meditative 
indifference," ' 



xvi LIFE AND CHARACTER 

In these early years, I remember, the diary 
took the outward form rf an old exercise book, 
neatly labelled and numbered, and it reflected 
all his observations on nature. The records, 
some of which were reproduced from time to 
time in The Zoologist, were valuable not 
only in their careful exactitude, but for their 
breadth of suggestion, and that inquiring 
spirit into the why of things which proved 
him to be no mere classifier or reporter. 
They were the outcome of long vigils ot 
concentrated watching. I have known him 
to stay for two or three hours at a stretch in 
one tense position, silently noting the torpid 
movements of half a dozen bats withdrawn 
from some disused mine and kept for experi- 
ments in the little drawing-room that was 
more like a laboratory than a place to sit in. 
He probably knew more about North Devon 
and the wild creatures that inhabited its 
wide spaces than any living person. Some- 
times he was accompanied on his journeys, 
which occupied most of his spare time and 
the greater part of the week-ends, by two or 
three boisterously high-spirited acquaintances 



OF BARBELLION xvii 

of his own age, who, though leagues removed 
from him in character and outlook, seemed 
to find a mysterious charm in his companion- 
ship, and whose solemn respect for his natural 
history lore he cunningly made use of by 
employing them to search for specimens 
under his guidance and direction. 

When he was fourteen years of age his 
fixed determination to become a naturalist 
by profession was accepted by all of us as 
a settled thing. JNIy father, whose income 
was at this time reduced through illness by 
about half, generously encouraged him in 
his ambition by giving him more pocket 
money than any of his brothers and sisters 
had received in palmier days, in order that 
he might add to his rapidly increasing library 
of costly books on zoology and biology ; and 
by allowing him such freedom of move- 
ment as can rarely fall to the lot of a small 
boy in an ordinary middle-class home. 
Here let me say that after the publication 
of his Journal^ Barbellion himself expressed 
regret at having here and there in the book 
unconsciously conveyed the impression that 



xviii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

in the home of his childhood and youth he 
received little practical help and sj^npathy 
in the pursuit of his great quest. The exact 
contrary was, in fact, the case ; and when 
in 1910, owing to my father's second, and 
this time complete, breakdown Barbellion 
had to decline the offer of a small appoint- 
ment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, 
the blow was not less bitter to his parents 
than to himself At that time he was the 
only son at home. He had been allowed 
a great amount of leisure for study ; but 
now, as one of two young reporters on my 
father's staff, he was compelled for the time 
being to carry a responsibility which he 
feared and detested. But the opportunity 
for which he had passionately worked and 
impatiently waited was not long in coming. 
In the following year, in open competition 
with men from the Universities who had been 
specially coached for the examination, he 
won his way by his own exertions to the 
staff of the Natural History Museum at 
South Kensington. 

Probably the happiest period of his life 



OF BARBELLION xix 

'as that of his late youth up to the time of 
ly father's collapse. He was in somewhat 
etter health than in his childhood ; the joy 
uf living intoxicated his being ; he was able 
to saunter at his own free will over his 
beloved hills and dales ; he was beginning to 
feel his strength and to shape his knowledge ; 
nd before him stretched a bright vista of 
ague, alluring, infinite possibilities. And at 
this time, apart from the diary, he was trying 
Viis hand at writing, and revelling in that 
delicious experience of youth — putting to 
•roof his newly awakened powers. I have 
i a my possession scores of early letters that 
estify eloquently to his ability to perceive, 
o think, and to write. Here is a letter which, 
it the age of seventeen, he wrote to my 
)rother Harry. It seems to me remarkable 
:ov the vigour and clearness with which he 
was able to set down his reflections on a dark 
and difficult point of philosophy, and interest- 
ing because it shows how already his mind 
was occupied with the mystery of himself. 

" I am writing really [he says] to discuss ' Myself ' 
with you. I am particularly interested in it [an 



XX LIFE AND CHARACTER 

article on "Myself' written by Harry] because it 
differs so entirely from my own feelings. I am a 
mendicant friar. It is so difficult to see what one 
really believes, as distinct from what one feels \ but 
for myself I can see only too distinctly the world 
without my own insignificant self, after death or 
before birth, 

" There is one power which I have to an unusual 
extent developed, so I think, and that is the faculty 
of divesting my thoughts of all subjectivity. I can 
see myself as so much specialised protoplasm. 
Sometimes I almost think that in thus divesting the 
mind of particulars I seize the universal and for a 
short but vivid moment look through the veil at 
'the thing itself I really cannot make myself 
clear without a great deal of care, and I hope you 
will not misunderstand me. 

" But, to diverge somewhat, it was only the other 
day that suddenly, when I was not expecting it, I 
saw mother's face in an objective way. I saw and 
looked on it as a stranger who had never seen her ; 
and mind you, there is a good deal of difference 
between these two points of view. I never realised 
until that moment that we look on those whom we 
know so well in the light and shade of the know- 
ledge we have gained before. . . . 

"The natural conclusion of these observations I 
take to be that we never know how anthropomorphic 
our views may really be. (Somebody else has said 
this somewhere, but I don't know who. Huxley ?) I 



OF BARBELLION xxi 

am naturally sceptical of all sciences and systems 
of philosophy. Science, of course, deals with the 
experienced universe, and cannot possibly ever reach 
ultimate truth. In philosophy I am always haunted 
by the suspicion that, if we only knew, we are not 
anywhere near being able to make even a rough 
guess at the truth. 

" Throw a dog a bone. Til take it that the dog, 
if it is an intelligent one, discusses the bone 
thoroughly. It discovers the natural law of the 
bone — that it satisfies hunger and provides happiness, 
and it forms a scientific theory (intelligent dog, 
mind you) to explain this inseparable correlative 
phenomenon. It says : ' The world is probably to 
be considered as an immense mechanism of separate 
bone-throwing machines, worked by an unknown 
creature. Bone is necessary to the dog existence as 
it is the ineffable vital essence of Divine Love in 
which we live, move, and have our being. This is so, 
because it has been proved by experiment that in 
the absence of bone-throwers, dogs have been known 
to die.' 

" Of course you laugh. But why not .'' I cannot 
help thinking that we may very well be as much in 
the dark as the dogs. Our philosophy may be 
incorrect in respect of the Universe, Reality, and 
God as the dog's philosophy is in respect of the 
simple process of digestion and the accompanying 
physiological changes. 

" If I could drop my anchor behind a rock of 



xxii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

certainty I should be greatly relieved, but who can 
convince a man if he cannot convince himself ? 

" To sum up, what I think is that we — i.e., each 
one of us separately — are exceedingly unimportant 
wisps, little bits of body, mind, and spirit, but that 
in the whole, as humanity, we are a great immortal 
organism of real import if we could see behind the 
veil. In other words I regard individuals as in- 
effectual units, but the mass as a spiritual power. 
The old philosophical idea that the world was a big 
animal had an element of truth in it." 



It was only by the skin of his teeth that 
Barbellion passed the doctors after getting 
through the scientific examination for the 
South Kensington post. He was suffering 
from chronic dyspepsia, he was more than six 
feet in height, and as thin as a rake, and he 
looked hke a typical consumptive. The 
medical gentlemen solemnly shook their 
heads, but after scrutinising him with as 
much care as if he were one of his own 
museum specimens they could discover 
no organic defect, and their inability to 
" classify " him no doubt saved Barbellion 
from what would have been the most dread- 
ful disappointment of his life. His appear- 



OF BARBELLION xxiii 

ance, notwithstanding his emaciation, was 
striking. His great height, causing him to 
stoop shghtly, produced an air and attitude 
of studiousness pecuHar to himself. A head 
of noble proportions was crowned by a thick 
mass of soft, brown hair tumbling carelessly 
about his brow. Deepset, lustrous eyes, wide 
apart and aglow with eager life, lighted up 
a pale, sharply pointed countenance with an 
indescribable vividness of expression. His 
nose, once straight and shapely, owing to an 
accident was irregular in its contour, but by 
no means unpleasing in its irregularity, for 
it imparted a kind of rugged friendliness to 
the whole face ; and he had a curious habit 
in moments of animation of visibly dilating 
the nostrils, as if unable to contain his 
excitement. His mouth was large, firm, 
yet mobile, and his chin like a rock. He 
had a musical voice, which he used without 
effort, and when he spoke, especially when 
he chose to let himself go on any subject 
that had aroused his interest, the energetic 
play of his features, the vital intensity which 
he threw into every expression, had an 



xxiv LIFE AND CHARACTER 

irresistible effect of compulsion upon his 
friends. His hands were strong and sensi- 
tive, with a remarkable fineness of touch 
very useful to him in the laboratory, and it 
was always a pleasure to watch them at 
work upon a delicate dissection. His hands 
and arms were much more active members 
than his legs. In conversation he tried in 
vain to control a lifelong and amusing habit 
of throwing them out and beating the air 
violently to emphasise a point in argument. 
But he moved and walked languidly, like a 
tired man, as indeed he was. He was con- 
tinuously unwell — "chronically sub-normal" 
was how he once described his condition to 
me, half playfully. He had lost forever that 
sense of abounding physical well-being which 
gives zest to living and strength to endure. 
But he has discussed his own symptoms 
in the Journal with a force and ironic 
humour that I have not the capacity or the 
will to imitate. I will say no more than 
that those who were closest to him re- 
member with wondering admiration the 
magnificent struggle which he maintained 



m OF BARBELLION xxv 

against his illness and its effect upon his 
work. His attacks of depression he kept 
almost invariably to himself. In the presence 
of others he was full of high courage, en- 
grossed in his plans for the future, strong 
in the determination not to be mastered by 
physical weakness. " I am not going to be 
beaten " he declared after one very bad bout, 
" if I develop all the diseases in the doctor's 
index. I mean to do what 1 have set out 
to do if it has to be done in a bath-chair." 
His will-power was enormous, unconquer- 
able. Again and again he spurred himself 
on to work with an appalling expenditure of 
nervous energy, when an ordinary man might 
have flung up his hands and resigned himself 
to passive despair. 

Let me quote from one of many letters 
written to me from South Kensington, all 
charged with a strangely arresting amalgam 
of hope, despair, defiance, cravings for 
imaginative sympathy, lofty ideals, and 
throbbing with a prodigious passion of life. 
Each and every one was a challenge and a 
protest. Surely there never was a half- 



xxvi LIFE AND CHARACTER 

dead man more alive. It was shortly after 
war broke out that he wrote this letter : j 

" The reason why the article ' The Joy of Life '' 
has not been sent you is because it is not finished. . . . 
My mood just now is scarcely fitted for the comple- 
tion of an essay with such a title. I am like to ask 
sullenly, " What the deviPs the good .?" I have 
already drawn out of ray inside big ropy entrails, all 
hot and steaming, and you say ' Very nice,' or 
' effectively expressed,' and Austin Harrison says he 
is ' too full up.' Damn his eyes ! Damn everything i 
Hall Caine, poor man, said once that a most terrible 
thing had happened to him. He sat in a railway 
carriage opposite a young woman reading a book 
written ' in his life's blood,' and she kept looking up 
listlessly to see the names of the stations. ' The Joy 
of Life/ my friend, in the completed state will make 
people sit up perhaps. So I think as I write it. 
But perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. It has been like the 
birth of a child to me. Fve been walking about ' in 
the family way.' The other essay was a relief to be 
able to bring forth. Both are self-revelations. . . . 
My journal is full of them, and one day when, as is 
probable, I have predeceased you, you will find much 
of B. F. C. in it almost as he appears to His Maker, 
It is a study in the nude, with no appeal to the 

highly pemmicanised intellect of such a being as , 

but there is meaty stuff in it, raw, red, or underdone. 

"It is curious to me how satisfied we all are with 
wholly inadequate opinions and ideas as to the 



OF BARBELLION xxvii 

character and nature of our friends. For example, I 
have a rough-and-ready estimate of yourself which 
has casually grown up over a series of years. But I 
don't really feel very satisfied that I know you, and 
most folk wouldn't care if they didn't. They want 
neither to understand nor to be understood. They 
walk about life as at a mask ball, content to remain 
unknown and unrealised by the consciousness of any 
single human being. A man can live with his wife 
all his days and never be known to her — particularly 
if they are in love. And the extraordinary thing to 
me is that they don't wish to understand each other. 
They accept each other's current coin without 
question. That seems to me to be uncanny — to be 
lolling about in the arms of someone who is virtually 
a stranger to you. 

" Not only ourselves, but everything is bound 
about with innumerable concentric walls of impene- 
trable armour. I long to pull them down, to tear 
down all the curtains, screens, and dividing partitions, 
to walk about with my clothes off, to make a large 
ventral incision and expose my heart. I am sick of 
being tied up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by 
walls, by prosies, deceits. I want to pull people by 
the nose and be brutally candid. I want everyone to 
know, to be told everything. It annoys me to find 
someone who doesn't realise some horrible actuality 
like cancer or murder, or who has not heard of 
R. L. S., or like an infamous man I met the other 
day who was not sufficiently alive to know that it 



xxviii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

was Amundsen not Scott (as he nonchalantl 
assumed) who got to the Pole first. . . . 

" You ask for mj dyspepsia in a way which, mj 
dear, good lad, I cannot resist. Well, it has bee) 
bad, damned bad. There you are ! I have been ii^ 
hell without the energy to lift up mine eyes. Thd 
first twenty-five years of my life have chased me up 
and down the keyboard. I have been to the top 
and to the bottom, very happy and very miserable^ 
But don't think I am whining— I prefer a life whiclj 
is a hunt, and an adventure rather than a study in 
still life. If you suffer, Balzac said proudly, at leasti 
you Hve. If I were suddenly assured of wealth and 
health, long to live, I should have to walk about 
cutting other people's throats so as to reintroduce 
the element of excitement. At this present momenti 
I am feeling so full of Joie de vivre that a summons!' 
to depart coming now would exasperate me into fury, j 
I should die cursing like an intoxicated trooper. Itj 
seems unthinkable — if life were the sheer wall of a| 
precipice, I should stick to it by force of attraction ! j 

" You shall see in the ' Joy of Life ' how much 1 1 
have grown to love it. There is a little beast which ! 
draws its life to start with rather precariously 
attached to a crab. But gradually it sends out! 
filaments which burrow in and penetrate every fibre j 
of its host so that to separate host and parasite ! 
means a grievous rupture. I have become attached 
in the same way, but not to a crab ! 

"Life is extraordinarily distracting. At times I 



OF BARBELLION xxix 

'oology melts away from my purview. Gradually, I 
houldn't be at all surprised if other interests burrow 
n under my foundations (laid in Zoology) and 
[he whole superstructure collapse. If I go to a 
culpture gallery, the continued study of entomology 
ppears impossible — I will be a sculptor. If I go to 
he opera, then I am going to take up music seriously. 
; )r if I get a new beast (an extraordinary new form 
if bird parasite brought back by the New Guinea 
i^xpedition, old sport! phew!) nothing else can 
nterest me on earth, I think. But something does, 
,nd with a wrench I turn away presently to fresh 
)astures. Life is a series of wrenches, I tremble for 
he fixity of my purposes ; and as you know so well, 
'. am an ambitious man, and my purposes are very 
lear to me. You see what a trembling, colour- 
;hanging, invertebrate, jelly-fish of a brother you 
lave. . . . But you are the man I look to. . . ."" 

Whatever kind of man Barbellion may 
lave been he certainly was not a jelly-fish. 
Any or all of these sentiments might have 
3ome red-hot from his diary, and they are 
absolutely typical of the delightfully stimu- 
lating and provocative letters which he loved 
to write, and could write better than any 
man I have ever known. He was as greedy 
as a shark for life in the raw, for the whole 
Df life. He longed to capture and compre- 



XXX LIFE AND CHARACTER 

hend the entire universe, and would nevd 

i 

have been content with less. " I couli 
swallow landscapes," he says, " and swil 
down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth td 
me with hoops of steel, but the world is sc 
impassive, silent, secret." He despised hii 
body because it impeded his pursuit of th^ 
elusive uncapturable. And while he pursueq 
Fate, Fate followed close on his heels. Iiij 
London he grew slowly and steadily worsei 
Doctors tinkered with him, and he tinkerecl 
himself with their ineffectual nostrums. Bull 
at last, after he had complained one day of 
partial blindness and of loss of power in his! 
right arm, I persuaded him, on the advicel 
of a wisely suspicious young physician, to! 
see a first-class nerve specialist. This man 
quickly discovered the secret of his complex 
and never-ending symptoms. Without re- 
vealing the truth to Barbellion, he told me 
that he was a doomed man, in the grip of a 
horrible and obscure disease of which I had 
never heard. Disseminated sclerosis was 
the name which the specialist gave to it ; 
and its effect, produced apparently by a 



OF BARBELLION xxxi 

microbe that attacks certain cells of the 
spinal cord, is to destroy in the course of 
a few years — or in some cases many years 
—every function of the body, killing its 
victim by degrees in a slow, ruthless process 
of disintegration. 

The specialist was strongly of the opinion 
that the truth should not be told my brother. 
" If we do so," he said, " we shall assuredly 
kick him down the hill far more quickly than 
he will travel if we keep him hopeful by 
treating the symptoms from time to time as 
they arise." Barbellion, then, was told he 
was not " up to standard," that he had been 
working too hard, was in need of a prolonged 
rest, and could be restored to health only 
iby means of a long course of careful and 
regular treatment. The fact disposes of the 
criticism of a few unfriendly reviewers who, 
without reading the Journal closely enough 
to disarm their indignation, accused Barbel- 
lion of a selfish and despicable act in getting 
married when he knew himself to be dying 
from an incurable malady. Whether I was 
right or wrong in accepting the medical man's 



xxxii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

advice, I do not regret the course 1 tookjj 

Barbellion, in a moment of overwhelming 

despair at the tragedy of his Hfe, and theji 

calamity it had brought upon his wife anqi 

child, afterwards cried out in protest against; 

my deception — based as it was on experij 

judgment, and inspired solely by an afFectionn 

ate desire to shield him from acute distress 

in the remaining period of his life after Ij 

had been told that he might live five, ten,i 

fifteen years longer. Yet, reviewing all the! 

circumstances, 1 realise that I could havei 

i 
come to no other decision even if I might j 

have foreseen all that was to follow. Let it be | 

clearly understood that the devoted woman to I 

whom he became engaged was at once madej 

aware of his actual condition, and after con- 1 

sultation with her family and an interview | 

with the doctor, who left her under no mis- 1 

apprehension as to the facts, she calmly and j 

courageously chose to link her fate with that j 

of Barbellion. How by a curious and \ 

dramatic accident Barbellion shortly after his 

marriage discovered the truth about himself, 

and kept it for a time from his wife in the 



OF BARBELLION xxxiii 

:)eiief that she did not know, is related with 
inconscious pathos in the Journal. 

BarbelHon was married in September, 

1915. In July, 1917, he was compelled to 

•esign his appointment at the South Ken- 

;ington Museum. His life came to an end 

m October 22, 1919, in the quaint old 

country cottage at Gerrard's Cross, Bucking- 

lamshire, where for many months he had 

lain like a wraith, tenderly ministered to 

In his utter weakness by those who loved 

iiim. His age was thirty-one. He was glad 

o die. " Life," to use a phrase he was fond 

)f repeating, "pursued him like a fury" to 

he end ; but as he lingered on, weary and 

lelpless, he was increasingly haunted by the 

jiear of becoming a grave burden to his 

amily. The publication of the Journal and 

he sympathetic reception it met with from 

he press and public were sources of profound 

i omfort to his restless soul, yearning as he 

[lad yearned from childhood to find friendly 

listeners to the beating of his heart, fiercely 

[•anting for a large-hearted response to 

[is self-revealing, half-wistful, half-defiant 



xxxiv LIFE AND CHARACTER 

appeal to the comprehension of all humanityj 
" The kindness almost everybody has showi 
the Journal, and the fact that so manj 
have understood its meaning," he said tij 
me shortly before he died, " have entirely 
changed my outlook. My horizon haj 
cleared, my thoughts are tinged with sweeti 
ness, and I am content." Earlier than thfl 
he had written : " During the past twelvd 
months I have undergone an upheaval, an(i 
the whole bias of my life has gone acrosji 
from the intellectual to the ethical. I kno'vii 
that Goodness is the chief thing." j 

He did not accomplish a tithe of what hd 
had planned to do, but in the extent anc 
character of his output he achieved by sheej 
force of will-power, supported by an inj 

vincible ambition and an incessant Intel 

I 

lectual industry that laughed his ill-healtll 
in the face, more than seemed possible t(| 
those of us who knew the nature of th^ 
disorder against which he fought witl! 
undying" courage every day of his life; 
It is scarcely surprising that there have 
been diverse estimates of his character and 



OF BARBELLION xxxv 

capacities, some wise and penetrating, many 
imperfect and wide of the mark. It is not 
for me to try to do more than correct a few 
crude or glaringly false impressions of the 
kind of man Barbellion was. Others must 
judge of the quality of his genius and of his 
place in life and literature. But I can 
speak of Barbellion as the man I knew him 
to be. He was not the egotist, pure and 
simple, naked and complete, that he some- 
times accused himself of being and is 
supposed by numerous critics and readers 
of the Journal to have been. 

His portrait of himself was neither con- 
summate nor, as Mr. Shanks well says, 
"immutable." "In the nude," declared 
Barbellion, more than once, with an air of 
blunt finality. Yes, but only as he imagined 
himself to look in the nude. 

He was forever peering at himself from 

changing angles, and he was never quite 

sure that the point of view of the moment 

was the true one. Incontinently curious 

about himself, he was never certain about 

jthe real Barbellion. One day he was " so 



xxxvi LIFE AND CHARACTER , 

i 

much specialised protoplasm "; another day 
he was Alexander with the world at hisi 
feet ; and then he was a lonely boy pining; 
for a few intimate friends. His sensations; 
at once puzzled and fascinated him. 

" I am apparently [he said] a triple personality : 
(1) The respectable youth ; (2) the foul-mouthed; 
commentator and critic; (3) the real but un- 
known I.'" 

Many times he tried thus to docket his 
manifold personality in distinguishable de- 
partments. It was a hopeless task. " Re 
spectabihty " was the last word to apply to 
him. Foul-mouthed he never was, unless a; 
man is foul-mouthed who calls a thing by its I 
true name and will not cover it with a shamj 
or a substitute. In his talks with me he 
was as " abandoned " in his frankness as in 
the Journal ; and the longer I knew him the j 
more I admired the boldness of his vision : 
the unimpeachable honesty and therefore 
the essential purity of his mind. 

His habit of self-introspection and his 
mordant descriptions of his countless symp- 
toms were not the "inward notes" or the 



I OF BARBELLION xxxvii 

fiveak outpourings of a hypochondriac. His 
JArhole bearing and his attitude to Hfe in 
general were quite uncharacteristic of the 
hypochondriac as that type of person is 
iommonly depicted and understood. It 
;hould be remembered that his symptoms 
^ere real symptoms and as depressing as 
:hey were painful, and his disease a terribly 
•eal disease which affected from the be- 
ginning almost every organ of his body, 
rhough he was rarely miserable he had 
{omething to be miserable about, and the 
iccepted definition of a hypochondriac is 
:hat of one whose morbid state of mind is 
produced by a constitutional melancholy for 
A^hich there is no palpable cause. He 
icarcely ever spoke of his dyspepsia, his 
nuscular tremors, his palpitations of the 
iieart, and all the other physical disturbances 
vhich beset him from day to day, except 
vith a certain wry humour ; and while it is 
;rue that he would discuss his condition 
vith the air of an enthusiastic anatomist 
vho had just been contemplating some 
tinusually interesting corpus vile, he talked 



xxxviii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

of it only when directly questioned about it, 
or to explain why a piece of work that he 
was anxious to finish had been interrupted 
or delayed. He had a kind of disgust for 
his own emaciated appearance, arising, not 
improbably, from his aesthetic admiration 
for the human form in its highest develop- 
ment. On one occasion, when we were 
spending a quiet holiday together at a little 
Breton fishing village, I had some difficulty 
in persuading him to bathe in the sea on 
account of his objection to exposing his 
figure to the view of passers-by. The only 
thing that might be considered in the least 
morbid in his point of view with regard to 
his health was a fixed and absolutely 
erroneous belief that his weakness was 
hereditary. His parents were both over 
sixty when they died from illnesses each of 
which had a definitely traceable cause. 
Though the other members of the family 
enjoyed exceptionally good health, he con- 
tinued to the last to suspect that we were 
all physically decadent, and nothing could 
shake his conviction that my particular 



OF BARBELLION xxxix 

complaint was heart disease, regardless of 
the fact frequently pointed out to him 
that in the Army I had been passed Al 
with monotonous regularity. 

Mr. Wells has referred to him as "an 
egotistical young naturalist"; in the same 
allusion, however, he reiterated the funda- 
mental truth that " we are all egotists 
within the limits of our power of expres- 
sion." Barbellion was intensely interested 
in himself, but he was also intensely in- 
terested in other people. He had not that 
egotistical imagination of the purely self- 
centred man which looks inward all the 
time because nothing outside the province 
of his own self-consciousness concerns him. 
He had an objective interest in himself, an 
outcome of the peculiar faculty which he 
divulged in the first of the two letters 
already quoted of looking at human beings, 
even his own mother, objectively. He 
described and explained himself so persist- 
ently and so thoroughly because he had an 
obviously better opportunity of studying 
himself with nice precision and attentive 



xl LIFE AND CHARACTER 

care than he had for the study of other 
people. He regarded himself quite openly 
and quite naturally as a human specimen 
to be examined, classified, and dissected, 
and he did his work with the detailed 
skill and the truthful approach of a 
scientific investigator. The "limits of his 
power of expression" being far beyond 
those of the average man, he was able to 
give a picture of himself that lives on 
account of its simple and daring candour. 
He is not afraid to be frank in giving 
expression to a thought merely because it 
may be an unpleasant or a selfish thought. 
If a shadowy doubt assails him, or an outre 
criticism presents itself about a beloved 
friend, he sets it down ; if he feels a sensuous 
joy in bathing in the sea and loves to look 
upon his "pink skin," or derives a catlike 
satisfaction from rolling a cigarette between 
his fingers ; if he thinks he sees a meanness 
in his own heart, or catches himself out in 
some questionable or unworthy piece of 
conduct, however trivial, the diary receives 
its faithful record. The dissimilarity between 



OF BARBELLION xli 

^'Barbellion and other persons is that, while 
those of us who have not been blessed or 
cursed with the temperament of an ox 
frequently experience these queer spon- 
taneous promptings about common things 
and about ourselves and our fellow-creatures 
that come we know not how or why, so far 
from dragging the half-formed thought into 

i the light of open confession and giving it 
definite shape, we avert our gaze as from 

||an evil thing, or return to it in secret and 

> stealth. It is scarcely possible, one imagines, 
to read Barbellion honestly without realis- 
ing that he says in plain, forceful language 
what the rest of us often think but have not 
the nerve to say aloud either to others or to 
ourselves. 

Resolute courage was the regnant quality 
of Barbellion's character. There was no 
issue he was afraid to face. The more it 

! frightened him the more grimly he held on. 

, Ineffaceable curiosity and the force of his 

I will were a formidable combination. He 
saw everything in focus, with clear and 
steady eye. He penetrated the heart of a 



xlii LIFE AND CHARACTER 

book with unerring instinct, as Balzac tore j 
out the secret of a woman's heart. It was 
hopeless to attempt to deceive him with a \ 
sophistry or a platitude. His sense of 
justice was deep and strong. While he 
loved disputation for its own sake, no form 
of mental recreation making a stronger 
appeal to his vivid intelligence than a set 
battle in dialectics, he rarely missed the 
essential argument, which he commonly 
handled with solid mastery and generally 
with a wealth of convincing illustrations. 
He was a captivating companion ; easy, 
humorous, and suggestive in his talk over a 
wide range of subjects, and knowing some- 
thing new or piquant about every bramble 
bush, every bird, every beetle that he 
passed or that flitted or crept across his 
path. Anyone less like a self-tormentor, 
a malade imaginaire, a man with a laugh 
on the wrong side of his mouth could not 
be imagined. It would be using a weak 
expression to say that he was cheerful. 
He was so acutely alive to the imperious 
charm of the world in which he lived that 



OF BARBELLION xliii 

a, fit of depression, caused usually by some 
Dbstinate symptom of ill-health, which 
foiled his plans and fretted his temper, 
would melt away at a touch. The cry of a 
peewit, a gleam of sunshine on the hill, a 
phrase from a Beethoven Symphony, a line 
out of Francis Thompson (whose gorgeous 
verse inflamed his senses to a white heat 
of enjoyment), or a warm note of human 
sympathy, would transform him at once into 
another being. He yearned for the fellow- 
ship of sympathy, and rejoiced exceedingly 
when he seemed to find it. He had 
a real capacity for friendship, and his 
affections, when once they were engaged, 
were deep and abiding ; but he could be 
impishly provoking to an acquaintance, and 
he suffered fools without gladness or much 
self-restraint. His judgments of men and 
women whom he met casually or infrequently 
were not to be relied upon. He was as 
impulsive as a woman of Barcelona, and the 
life-history of some harmless creature newly 
introduced would be created promptly on 
such inadequate data as a fortuitous remark, 



xliv^ LIFE AND CHARACTER 

an odd gesture, or a sweating hand. His 
nature, I believe, is less readily to be 
explained by his so-called egotism than by 
his supersensitiveness to the world about him 
and the beings in it. He bathed in the sea 
of life in a perpetual ecstasy, and sometimes 
it was an ecstasy of pain that made him call 
out upon God and all the gods, and the 
devils as well. One of the truest things I 
have heard said about him was said the 
other day by an accomplished critic who 
had never met him, but who had read his 
Journal with a seeing eye. " It seems to 
me," he remarked, " that Barbellion was a 
man with a skin too few." A wise saying 
to which Barbellion himself would have 
been the first to give his appreciative 
assent. 

Nearly every writer who has tried to form 
an estimate of my brother's potentialities 
has discussed the question whether he would 
have deserted the science of zoology, his 
first consuming love, for the broader paths of 
literature. Now that he is dead it must 
appear to be a fruitless speculation. But it 



OF BARBELLION xlv 

is not perhaps without interest. I am 
convinced that he would not have remained 
at South Kensington longer than was 
necessary to provide him with bread and 
butter. He was that comparatively rare 
combination — a man of science, and a man of 
letters. He was in love with life as soon as 
he was in love with science, and the life of 
man inspired his imagination more than the 
lives of the animals it was his business to 
know about. His scientific zeal was aroused 
in " an extraordinary new form of bird , 
parasite brought back by the New Guinea 
Expedition," as much because it was a new 
form of life as because it appealed to 
the enthusiasm of the trained zoologist. 
Years before he was filled with sickening 
disappointment by the drudgery of his 
labours and the narrow limitations imposed 
upon him in a department of Natural 
History that he cared for least, he was con- 
templating large literary schemes, some of 
which he unfolded to me with an infectious 
ardour of hope and determination. He 
planned in these years a novel that was to be 



xlvi LIFE AND CHARACTER 

of immense length, with something of th( 
scope of the Comedie Humaine, and a series ; 
of logically developed treatises on the lines 
of his essay, " The Passion for Perpetua- 
tion," which in his own words were to be his 
magnum opus. His hopes, high and un- 
quenchable as they always appeared to be, , 
were cut short by his lingering illness and 
his early death. There remain only a few 
documentary fragments that testify to the 
boldness of his intentions. His one pub- 
lished attempt at a short story, " How 
Tom Snored," is in my opinion quite 
unworthy of his abilities. It is impossible to 
say in what direction his undoubted literary 
powers would have found their true outlet. 
It is certain that if he had lived in the full 
enjoyment of normal health the Journal in 
its present outward form or as a narrative of 
his career and an unreserved record of his 
personal reflections would never have been 
published. It is equally certain that months 
before he resigned his appointment on the 
staff of the South Kensington Museum he 
was weary of his work there, and the bias of 



OF BARBELLION xlvii 

his mind was turning rapidly from the cause 
of biological science towards the humanities. 
His restless spirit demanded a wider range 
of expression, unhampered by the many 
exasperating futilities of his professional 
labours. But his published work is perhaps 
all the more valuable on account of his 
exertions in the laboratory, because even 
when he " meddles " in his fantastic and 
compelling way " with things that are too 
high for me, not as a recreation but as a 
result of intense intellectual discomfort " — 
even at these moments, when he plunges 
with impetuous gusto into the infinities of 
time and space and God, there is a certain 
sanity of statement, a suggestion of strength 
in reserve, a studied self-control in the 
handling of his theme that his scientific 
habit of mind makes possible and emphasises. 
This instinctive restraint can be discovered 
again and again in vehement passages that 
at a glance seem to bear the mark of reckless 
extravagance. 

A Last Diary is the last of Barbellion 
as a writer, For those of us who knew and 



xlviii LIFE OF BARBELLION 

loved him as a boy and as a man the 
memory of his masterful personality — his 
courage, his wit, his magnetism, his pride 
of intellect and his modesty withal, his 
afflictions, his affectionate tenderness — will 
endure without ceasing. As the most 
modern of the journal- writers he addresses 
to the public a dauntless message, the value 
and significance of which time alone can 
measure. Like all men of abnormal sensi- 
bility he suffered deeply ; but if he suffered 
deeply he enjoyed also his moments of 
exquisite happiness. He lived fast. He 
was for ever bounding forward in an un- 
tameable effort to grasp the unknown and 
unknowable. Fate struck him blow upon 
blow, but though his head was often bloody 
it remained unbowed. Mr. Wells says the 
story of his life is a "recorded unhappiness " 
I prefer to think of it as a sovereign 
challenge. 

A. J. CUMMINGS. 

1920. 



1918 



A LAST DIARY 

1918 

March 2\st, 1918. — Misery is protean in 
its shapes, for all are indescribable. I am 
tongue-tied. Folk come and see me and 
conclude it's not so bad after all — just as 
civilians tour the front and suppose they 
have seen war on account of a soldier with 
a broken head or an arm in a sling. Others 
are getting used to me, though I am not 
getting used to myself. 

Honest British jurymen would say 
" Temporarily insane " if I had a chance of 
showing my metal. I wish I could lapse 
into permanent insanity — 'twould be a 
relief to let go control and slide away down, 
down. Which is the farthest star ? I 
would get away there and start afresh, blot 
out all memory of this world and its doings. 
Here, even the birds and flowers seem 

3 



4 A LAST DIARY 

soiled. It makes me impatient to see them 
— they are indifferent, they do not know. 
Those that do not know are pathetic, and 
those knowing are miserable. It is ghostly 
to live in a house with a little child at the 
best of times — now at the w^orst of times a 
child's innocence haunts me always. 

March 25th, 1918.— I shall not easily 
forget yesterday (Sunday). It was just like 
Mons Sunday. The spring shambles began 
on Thursday in brilliant summer weather. 
Yesterday also was fine, the sky cloudless, 
very warm with scarcely a breeze. They 
wheeled me into the garden for an hour : 
primroses, violets, butterflies, bees ; the 
song of the chaffinches and thrushes — other- 
wise silence. With the newspaper on my 
knee, the beauty of the day was oppressive. 
Its unusualness at this time of year seemed 
of evil import. Folk shake their heads, and 
they say in the village there is to be an 
earthquake on account of the heat. In rural 
districts simple souls believe it is the end of 
the world coming upon us. 



A LAST DIARY 5 

At such times as these my isolation here 
is agonising. I write the word, but itself 
alone conveys little. I spend hours by 
myself unable to talk or write, but only to 
think. The war news has barely crossed my 
lips once, not even to the bedpost — in fact, 
I have no bedpost. And the cat and 
canary and baby would not understand. It 
is hard even to look them in the face 
without shame. All the while I hear the 
repeated " kling " in my ears as the wheel 
of my destiny comes full circle — not once 
but a hundred superfluous times. When 
am I going to die ? This is a death in life. 

I intended never to write in this diary 
again. But the relief it affords could not 
be refused any longer. I was surprised to 
find I could scribble at all legibly. Yet it 
is tiring. 

March '2^tli, 1918. — In reply to a query 
from me if there were any fresh news in the 
village this afternoon, my mother-in-law 
thus (an obiter dictum, while dandling 
the babe) : " No, not good news anyway. 



6 A LAST DIARY 

Still, when there's a thorough assault, we're 
bound to lose some. . . . Dancy, dancy, 
poppity pin," etc. 

But we are all moles, in cities as in villages, 
burrowing blindly into the future. These 
enormous prospects transcend vision ; we just 
go on and go on — following instinct, nursing 
babies, and killing our enemies. How un- 
speakably sorrowful the whole world is ! 
Poor men, killing each other. Murder, say, 
of a rival in love, is comparatively a hallowed 
thing because of the personal passion. 
Liberty ? Freedom ? These are things of 
the spirit. Every man is free if he will. 
Yet who is going to lend an ear to the words 
of a claustrated paralytic ? 1 expect I'm 
wrong, and I am past hammering out what 
is right. I must anaesthetise thought and 
accept without comment. My mind is in an 
agony of muddle, not only about this world 
but the next. 



A LAST DIARY 7 

Publication of the Journal 

31ay 29th, 1918.— This journal in part is 
being published in September (D.V. ). In 
the tempest of misery of the past three 
weeks, this fact at odd intervals has shone 
out like a bar of stormy white light. By 
September I anticipate a climax as a set-off 
to the achievement of my book. Perhaps, 
like Semele, I shall perish in the lightning I 
long for ! 

My dear E. has had a nervous breakdown 
— her despairing words haunt me. Poor, 
poor dear — I cannot go on. 

Jirne 1st, 1918. — A fever of impatience 
and anxiety over the book. I am terrified 
lest it miscarry. I wonder if it is being 
printed in London ? A bomb on the 
printing works ? 

When it is out and in my hands I shall 
believe. I have been out in a beautiful 
lane where I saw a white horse, led by a 
village child ; in a field a sunburnt labourer 
with a black wide-brimmed hat lifted it, 



8 A LAST DIARY 

smiling at me. He seemed happy and 1 
smiled too. 

Am immensely relieved that E. is better. 
I cannot, ca7inot endure the prospect of 
breaking her life and health. Dear woman, 
how 1 love you ! 

Regard these entries as so many weals 
under the lash. 

June Qrd, 1918. — When it is still scalding, 
grief cannot be touched. But now after 
twenty-five days, I look back on those 
dreadful pictures and crave to tell the story. 
It would be terrible. ... I scorn such 
self-indulgence, for the grief was not mine 
alone, nor chiefly, and I cannot desecrate 
hers. 

The extraordinary thing is that all this 
has no effect on me. The heart still goes 
on beating. I am not shrivelled. 

June 15th, 1918. — I get tired of these 
inferior people drawn together to look after 
me and my household. If, as to-day, 1 
utter a witticism, they hastily slur it over 
so as to resume the more quickly the flap- 



A LAST DIARY 9 

flap monotone of dull gossip. 1 had a 
suspicion once that my fun was at fault. 1 
was ill and perhaps had softening of the 
brain and delusions. So I made an experi- 
ment : I foisted off as my own some of the 
acknowledged master - strokes of Samuel 
Foote and Oscar Wilde, but with the same 
result. So 1 breathed again. 

However, I except the old village woman 
come in to nurse me while E. is away. She 
is a dear, talks little and laughs a lot, is 
mousy quiet if I wish, has lost a son in the 
war, has another an elementary- school master 
who teaches sciences — " a fine scientist." 
She keeps on feeling my feet and says, 
" They're lovely warm," or else is horrified 
because they are cold. Penelope she calls 
"little miss" (I like this), and attempts 
to caress her with, " Well, my little pet." 
But P. is a ruthless imp and screams at 
her. 

I sat up in my chair to tea yesterday. It 
was all very quiet, and two mice crept out 
of their holes and audaciously ate the crumbs 



10 A LAST DIARY ' 

that fell from my plate. It is a very old 
cottage. In the ivy outside a nest of young 
starlings keep up a clamour. The Doctor 
has just been (three days since) and says 
I may live for thirty years. I trust and 
believe he is a damned liar. 

The prospect of getting the proofs makes 
me horribly restless. The probability of an 
air raid depresses me, as I am certain the 
bombs will rain on the printers. Oh ! do 
hurry up ! These proofs are getting on my 
mind. 

Malignant Fate 

June 16th, 1918. — I'm damned; my ma- j 
lignant fate has not forsaken me ; after the ' 
agreement on each side has been signed, and 
the book partly set up in type, the publishers 
ask to be relieved of their undertaking. 
The fact is, the reader who accepted the 
MS. has been combed out, and his work 
continued by a member of the firm, a godly 



A LAST DIARY 11 

f man, afraid of the injury to the firm's reputa- 
tion as pubHshers of school-books and bibles ! 
H. G. Wells, who is writing an Introduction, 
- will be amused I At the best, it means 
■ an exasperating delay till another publisher 
is found. 

June 17th, 1918. — E. comes home on 
Thursday. 

A robin sits warming her eggs in a mossy 
hole in the woodshed. A little piece of her 
russet breast just shows, her bill lies like 
a little dart over the rim of the nest, and 
her beady eyes gleam in a fury at the little 
old nurse in her white bonnet and apron 
who stands about a yard away, bending 
down with hands on her knees, looking in 
and laughing till the tears run down her 
face : " Poor little body, poor little body — 
she's got one egg up on her back." They 
were a pretty duet. She is Flaubert's 
" Coeur simple." 

July 1st, 1918. — Turning out my desk I 
found the other day : 



12 A LAST DIARY 

" 37, West Frambes Ave., 
" Columbus, Ohio. 

"September 30th, 1915. 

"Mr. Bruce Cummings, England. 

" Dear Sir, 

" I wonder if you will pardon my 
impertinence in writing to you. You see I 
haven't even your address ; I am doing this 
in a vague way, but I wanted to tell you 
how much I appreciated your " Crying for 
the Moon" which I read in the April 
Forum. You have expressed for me, at 
least, most completely the insatiable thirst 
for knowledge. I can't live enough in the 
short time allotted to me, but I've seldom 
found anyone so eager, so desirous as you to 
secure all that this world has to offer in the 
way of knowledge. JNIy undergraduate 
work was done at Ohio State University. 
Then for two years following I was a Fellow 
in English at the same school, and at 
present I am here as a laboratory assistant 
in psychology. Always I am taking as 
much work as possible to secure as varied 



A LAST DIARY 13 

a knowledge as possible. 1 am working 
now for my doctor's degree ; I have my 
master's. 

" I have had the idea of trying only so 
much ; I can't get away from the Greek 
idea of Nemesis, but your article gave me 
the suggestion that one should try every- 
thing ; better to be scorched than not to 
know anything about everything. And so 
this year I am trying to lead a fuller life. 
The article has inspired and helped me 
to attain a clearer vision of the meaning 
of Life. As one of your readers, allow me 
to thank you for the splendid treat you gave 
us. Pardon please this long message. 
" Respectfully, 
*' (Miss) Veiiona Macdollinger." 

On its receipt, I was slightly flattered but 
chiefly scornful. I know the essay deserved 
better criticism. But now, I am touched — 
beggars can't be choosers — and grateful. 
Dear Miss Verona Macdollinger ! thank you 
so much for your sympathy, and your truly 



14 A LAST DIARY 

wonderful name. Perhaps you are married 
now and have lost it — perhaps there is a 
baby Verona. Perhaps ... I don't know, 
but I am curious about you. 

Four Weeks of Happiness 

August 1th, 1918. — In the cottage alone 
with E. and nurse. Four weeks of happi- 
ness — with the obvious reservation. I am 
in love with my wife ! Oh I dear woman, 
what agony of mind, and what happiness 
you give me. To think of you alone 
struggling against the world, and you are 
not strong, you want a protector, some- 
one's strong arm. But we are happy, 
these few weeks — I record it because it's so 
strange. I am deeply in love and long to 
have something so as to sacrifice it all 
with a passion, with a vehemence of self- 
abnegation. 

August \5th, 1918. — The Bishops are very 
preocupied just now in justifying the ways 
of God to man. I presume it an even 
harder task to justify the ways of man 



A LAST DIARY 15 

'Ito God. Why does not God stop the war? 
the people are asking — so the Bishops com- 
plain. But why did man make it ? Man 
made the war and we know his reasons. 
God made the world, but He keeps His own 
counsel. Yet if man, who aspires to good- 
ness and truth, can sincerely justify the 
war, I am willing to believe — this is my 
faith — that God can justify the world, its 
pain and suffering and death. We made the 
war and must assume responsibility. 

Yet why is not the world instantaneously 

I redeemed by a few words of reproach coming 

j from a dazzling figure in the Heavens, 
revealed unmistakably at the same instant 
to every man, woman, and child in the 

I world ? Why not a sign from Heaven ? 
Seytemher 1st, 1918. — Eighteen months 
ago I refused to take any more rat poison, 
with food so dear, and I refused to have 
any more truck with doctors. I insist on 
being left alone, this grotesque disease and 
I. Meanwhile I must elaborately observe 
it getting worse by inches. But I scoff at 



16 A LAST DIARY 

it. It's so damned ridiculous, and I only 
give ground obstinately, for I have two 
supreme objects in life which I have not yet 
achieved, tho' 1 am near, oh ! so very near 
the victory. The days creep past shrouded 
in disappointment ; still I cling to my spar — 
if not to-day, why then to-morrow, perhaps, 
and if not to-morrow it won't be so bad — 
not so very bad because The Times Literary 
Supplement comes then ; that lasts for two 
days, and then the Nation. . . . My 
thoughts move about my languid brain like 
caterpillars on a ravaged tree. All the 
while I am getting worse — and they are all so 
slow : if they don't hurry it will be too late 
— oh ! make haste. But I must wait, and 
the caterpillars must crawl. They are 
*' Looper " caterpillars, I think, which span 
little spaces. 

A Splendid Dream 

September 2nd, 1918. —It was a brilhantly 
fine day to-day, with the great avenue of 
blue sky and sunlight thro' groups of clouds 



A LAST DIARY 17 

ranged on each side. I rolled along a very- 
magnificent way bordered by tall silvered 
bracken and found two tall hedges. It 
irked me to remain on the hard road 
between those two high hedges fending me 
off from little groups of desirable birch-trees 
in the woodlands on each side. Suddenly I 
sprang from my chair, upset it, dumbfounded 
the nurse, and disappeared thro' the hedge 
into the woods. I went straight up to the 
birches and they whispered joyously : " Oh I 
he's come back to us." I pressed my lips 
against their smooth, virginal cheeks. I 
flung myself down on the ground and 
passionately squeezed the cool soft leaf- 
mould as a man presses a woman's breasts. 
I scraped away the surface leaves and, bend- 
ing down, drew in the intoxicating smell of 
the earth's naked flesh. ... It was a 
splendid dream. But I wonder if I could 
do it if absent-mindedly I forgot myself in 
an immense desire ! 



18 A LAST DIARY 

September 3rd, 1918. — Passed by the 
birches again to-day. Their leaves rustled 
as I approached, thrilling me like the 
liquefaction of Julia's clothes. But I shook 
my head and went by. Instantly they 
ceased to flutter, and no doubt turned to 
address themselves to prettier and more 
responsive young men who will pass along 
that road in the years to come. 

September Mh, 1918. — Still no news. I 
have to reinforce all the strength of my soul 
to be able to sit and wait day by day, im- 
potent and idle and alone. . . . 



Goodness the Chief Thing 

September 7th, 1918. — During the past 
twelve months I have undergone an up- 
heaval, and the whole bias of my life has gone 
across from the intellectual to the ethical. 
1 know that Goodness is the chief thing. 



A LAST DIARY 19 



Thatching : A Kodak Film 

September 2Mh, 1918. — Two brown men 
on a yellow round rick, thatching ; in the 
background, a row of green elms ; above, 
a windhover poised in mid-air ; perpendicu- 
lar silver streaks of rain ; bright sunlight, 
and a rainbow encircling all. It was as 
simple as a diagram. One could have cut 
out the picture with a pair of scissors. I 
looked with a cold detached eye, for all the 
world as if the thatchers had no bellies nor 
immortal souls, as if the trees were timber 
and not vibrant vegetable life ; I forgot 
that the motionless windhover contained a 
wonderful and complex anatomy, rapidly 
throbbing all the while, and that the sky 
was only a painted ceiling. 

But this simplification of the universe 
was such a relief. It was nice for once in a 
way not to be teased by its beauty or over- 
stimulated by its wonder. I merely received 
the picture like a photographic plate. 



20 A LAST DIARY 

September 25th, 1918. — Saw a long-tailed 
tit to-day. Exquisite little bird ! It was 
three years since I saw one. I should like 
to show one to Hindenburg, and watch 
them in juxtaposition. I wonder what 
would be their mutual effect on each other. 
I once dissected a " specimen " — God for- 
give me — but I didn't find out anything. 



Emily Bronte 

Septembei' 26th, 1918. — It was over ten 
years ago that I read Wuthering Heights. 
Have just read it again aloud to E., and am 
delighted and amazed. When I came to 
the dreadfully moving passages of talk be- 
tween Cathy and Heathcliff 

" ' Let me alone, let me alone,' sobbed 
Catherine. ' If I have done wrong, I'm 
dying for it. It is enough ! You left me 
too ! But I won't upbraid you for it ! I 
forgive you I Forgive me !' 

" ' It is hard to forgive, and to look at 



A LAST DIARY 21 

those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he 
answered. ' Kiss me again, and don't let me 
see your eyes! I forgive you what you 
have done to me. I love my murderer — 
but yours ? How can I ?' " 

I had to stop and burst out laughing, or I 
should have burst into tears. E. came over 
and we read the rest of the chapter together. 

1 can well understand the remark of 
Charlotte, a little startled and propitiatory 
— that having created the book, Emily did 
not know what she had done. She was the 
last person to appreciate her own work. 

Emily was fascinated by the heauoo yeux 
of fierce male cruelty, and she herself once, 
in a furious rage, blinded her pet bulldog 
with blows from her clenched fist. Wiither- 
ing Heights is a story of fiendish cruelty and 
maniacal love passion. Its preternatural 
power is the singular result of three factors 
in rarest combination — rare genius, rare 
moorland surroundings, and rare character. 
One might almost write her down as Mrs. 
Nietzsche — her religious beliefs being a com- 



22 A LAST DIARY 

paratively minor divergence. However that 
may be, the young w^oman who wrote in the 
poem " A Prisoner " that she didn't care 
whether she went to Heaven or Hell so long 
as she was dead, is no fit companion for the 
young ladies of a seminary. *' No coward 
soul is mine," she tells us in another poem, 
with her fist held to our wincing nose. I, 
for one, believe her. It would be idle to 
pretend to love Emily Bronte, but I venerate 
her most deeply. Even at this distance, I 
feel an immediate awe of her person. For 
her, nothing held any menace. She was 
adamant over her ailing flesh, defiant of 
death and the lightnings of her mortal 
anguish — and her name was Thunder ! 

Raskolnikoff and Sonia 

October 4<f/i, 1918. — This evening, E. being 
away in Wales for a few days, sat with 
Nurse, who with dramatic emphasis and real 
understanding read to me in the firelight St. 
Matthew's account of the trial of Jesus. It 



A LAST DIARY 23 

reminded me, of course, of Raskolnikoff and 
Sonia, in Ciime and Punishment, reading the 
Bible together, though my incident was in a 
minor key. Nurse told me of the wrangle 
between Mr. P. and Miss B. over teach- 
ing the Sunday School children all about 
hell. 

October 5th, 1918. — Some London neu- 
rologist has injected a serum into a woman's 
spine with beneficial results, and as her 
disease is the same as mine, they wish me to 
try it too. I may be able to walk again, to 
write, etc., my life prolonged I 

They little know what they ask of me. 
Whatever the widow may have expressed, I 
doubt not Jesus received scant gratitude 
from the widow's son at Nain for his resur- 
rection — and I have been dead these eighteen 
months. Death is sweet. All my past life 
is ashes, and the prospect of beginning anew 
leaves me stone cold. They can never 
understand — I mean my relatives — what a 
typhoon I have come through, and just as I 
am crippling into port I have no mind to 



24 A LAST DIARY 

put to sea again ! I am too tired now to 
shoulder the burden of Hope again. This 
chance, had it been earher, had been welcome, 
but in this present mood Life seems more of 
a menace than Death ever did. At the best 
it would be whinings and pinings and terrible 
regrets. And how could I endure to be 
watching her struggles, and, if further mis- 
fortune came, how could 1 meet her eyes ? 

In short, you see, I funk it, yet I am sure 
the best thing for her would be to wipe out 
this past, forget it and start fresh. Memory 
even of these sad years would lose its outline 
in course of time. My pity merely enervates ; 
and sympathy takes on an almost cynical 
appearance where help is needed. 

November 2nd, 1918. — The war news is 
fine ! For weeks past I have gained full 
possession of my soul and lived in dignity 
and serenity of spirit as never before. It 
has been a gradual process, but I am 
changed, a better man, calm, peaceful, 
and, by Jove! top dog. May God forgive 
me all my follies. My darling E., I 



A LAST DIARY 25 

know, is secretly travelling along the 
same mournful road as I have travelled 
these many years, and am now arrived 
at the end of, and I must lend her all 
the strength I can. But it is hard to try 
to undo what I have done to her. Time 
is our ally, but it moves so slowly. 

November 3rd to November 26th, 1918. — 
Posterity will know more about these times 
than we do. Men are now too preoccupied 
to digest the volume of history in each day's 
newspaper. 

On the 11th my newspaper never came at 
all, and I endured purgatory. Heard the 
guns and bells and felt rather weepy. In 
the afternoon Nurse wheeled me as far as 
the French Horn, where I borrowed a paper 
and sat out in the rain reading it. 

Some speculators have talked wildly about 
the prospect of modern civilisation, in default 
of a League of Nations, becoming extinct. 
Modern civilisation can never be extinguished 
by anything less than a secular cataclysm or 
a new Ice Age. You cannot analogise the 



26 A LAST DIARY 

Minoan civilisation which has clean vanished. 
The world now is bigger than Crete, and its 
history henceforward will be a continuous 
development without any such lacuna as 
that between Ancient Greece and our Eliza- 
bethans. Civilisation in its present form is 
ours to hold and to keep in perpetuity, for 
better, for worse. There can be no mon- 
strous deflection in its evolution at this late 
period any more than we can hope to culti- 
vate the pineal eye on top of our heads — 
useful as it would be in these days of 
aeroplanes. But the chance is gone — evolu- 
tion has swept past. Perhaps on some other 
planet mortality may have had more luck. 
There are, peradventure, happy creatures 
somewhere in this great universe who 
generate their own light like glow-worms, 
or can see in the dark like owls, or who 
have wings like birds. Or there may be no 
mortality, only immortality, no stomachs, 
no 'flu, no pills — and no kisses, which would 
be a pity ! But it's no good we earth- 
dwellers repining now. It is too late. Such 



A LAST DIARY 27 

things can never be— not in our time, any- 
how ! So far as I personally am concerned, 
I am just now very glad man is only bipedal. 
To be a centipede and have to he in bed 
would be more than even I could bear. 

If the civilisations of Ancient Greece or 
Ancient Rome had permeated the whole 
world they would never have become ex- 
tinct. 

We are now entered on the kingless 
republican era. The next struggle, in some 
ways more bitter and more protracted than 
this, will be between capital and labour. 
After that, the millennium of Mr. Wells 
and the Spiritistic age. After the aeroplane, 
the soul. Few yet realise what a trans- 
formation awaits the patient investigations 
of the psychical researchers. We know next 
to nothing about the mind force and spirit 
workings of man. But there wdll be a tussle 
with hoary old materialists like Edward 
Clodd. 



28 A LAST DIARY 



The Old Lady Shoavs her Coins 

Noveviher 26th, 1918. — My old nurse 
lapses into bizarre malapropisms. She is 
afraid the Society for the Propagation of 
Cruelty to Animals will find fault with the 
way we house our hens ; for boiling potatoes 
she prefers to use the camisole (casserole) ! 
She says Mr. Bolflour, arminstance, von 
Tjipazz, and so on. Yesterday, in the long 
serenity of a dark winter's night, with a view 
to arouse my interest in life, she went and 
brought some heirloom treasures from the 
bottom of her massive trunk — some coins of 
George I. " Of course, they're all obsolute 
now," she said. " What! absolutely obso- 
lute?" I enquired in surprise. The answer 
was in the informative. 

In spite of physical difficulties surround- 
ing me in a mesh- work, I have now unaided 
corrected my proofs in joyful triumph — an 
ecstatic conqueror up to the very end. I 



A LAST DIARY 29 

take my life in homoeopathic doses now. I 
am tethered by but a single slender thread 
— curiosity to know what Mr. Wells says in 
the Preface — a little piece of vanity that 
deserves to be flouted. 

Novernber 29t/i, 1918. — O all ye people I 
the crowning irony of my life — where is the 
sacred oil? — is my now cast-iron religious 
convictions shortly summarised as Love 
and Unselfishness. These, my moral code, 
have captured the approval, not only of my 
ethical but my intellectual side as well. 
Undoubtedly, and dogmatically if you like, 
a man should be unselfish for the good of 
the soul and also to the credit of his 
intellect. To be selfish is to imprison in a 
tiny cage the glorious ego capable of pene- 
trating to the farthest confines of the uni- 
verse. As for love, it is an instinct and the 
earnest, like all beauty, physical as well as 
moral, of our future union into One. " One 
loving heart sets another on fire." — St. 
Augustine {Co7ifessions). 



30 A LAST DIARY 

December Isf, 1918. — What I have always 
feared is coming to pass — love for my little 
daughter. Only another communication 
string with life to be cut. I want to hear 
" the tune of little feet along the floor." I 
am filled with intolerable sadness at the 
thought of her. Oh ! forgive me, forgive me I 



The " PuGGiLisT " 

December 3rd, 1918. — "My word ! you do 
look a figure !" the old nurse exclaimed to 
me to-day in the course of one of the 
periodical tetanuses of all my muscles, when 
the whole body is contorted into a rigid 
tangle. " I shall never make a puggilist " 
(the word is her own), I said. 

I was rather impressed, though, for she is 
one of those who, like Mr. Saddletree, I 
believe, in The Heart of Midlot/iiafi, never 
notice anything. She would not notice if 
she came into my room, and I was standing 
on my head as stiff as a ferule. " You may 
observe," I should say, "I am standmg 



A LAST DIARY 31 

upside down — would you turn me round ?" 
" With pleasure," is her invariable reply to 
every request I proffer. 



Victory at Christmas 

December 23rd, 1918. — It is strange to 
hear all this thunderous tread of victory, 
peace, and Christmas rejoicings above 
ground, all muffled by the earth, yet quite 
audible. They have not buried me deep 
enough. Here in this vault all is un- 
changed. It is bad for me, for, as to-day, a 
faint tremor passes along my palsied limbs 
— a tremor of lust — lust of life, a desire to 
be up and mingling in the crowd, to be 
soaked up by it, to feel a sense of all man- 
kind flooding the heart, and strong mascu- 
line youth pulsing at the wrists. I can 
think of nothing more ennobling than the 
sense of power, unity, and manhood that 
comes to one in a sea of humanity, all 
animated by the same motive — to be sweep- 



32 A LAST DIARY 

ing folk off their feet and to be swept off 
oneself; that is to be man, not merely Mr. 
Brown. 



Death 

Christmas Day, 1918. — Surely, I muse, a 
man cannot be accounted a failure who 
succeeds at last in calling in all his idle 
desires and wandering motives, and with 
utter restfulness concentrating his life on 
the benison of Death. I am happy to think 
that, like a pilot hard aport, Death is ready 
at a signal to conduct me over this moaning 
bar to still deep w^aters. After four years of 
war, life has grown cheap and ugly, and 
Death — how desirable and sweet ! Youth 
now is in love with Death, and many are 
heavy-hearted because Death flouts their 
affection — the maimed, halt, and blind. 
How terrible if Life had no end ! 

With how splendid a zest the young 
men flung themselves on Death — like 



A LAST DIARY 38 

passionate lovers ! A magnificent slaughter 
— for indifference to Life is the noblest form 
of unselfishness, and unselfishness is the 
highest virtue. 

Victurosque Dei celant ut vivere durent^ 
Felix esse mori. Lucan, with Sir Thomas 
Browne's rendering : 

We're all deluded, vainly searching ways 
To make us happy by the length of days ; 
For cunningly, to make 's protract this breath. 
The gods conceal the happiness of death. 

This mood, not permanent, but recurring 
constantly, equals the happiness and comfort 
of the drowning man when he sinks for the 
third time. A profound compassion for my 
dear ones and friends, and all humanity left 
on the shore of this world struggling, fills 
my heart. I want to say genially and per- 
suasively to them as my last testament : 
Why not die ? What loneliness under the 
stars I It is only bland, unreflecting eupepsia 
that leads poets to dithyrambs about the 
heavenly bodies, and to call them all by 
beautiful names. Diana ! Yet the moon 



84 A LAST DIARY 

is a menace and a terrible object-lesson. 
Despite Blanco White, it were well if the 
night had never revealed the stars to us. 
Suppose a man with the swiftness of light 
touring through the darkness and cold of 
this great universe. He would pass through 
innumerable solar systems and discover 
plenty of pellets (like this earth, each 
surging with waves of struggling life, like 
worms in carrion). And he would tour 
onwards like this for ever and ever. There 
would be no end to it, and always he would 
be discovering more hot suns, more cold and 
blasted moons, and more pellets, and each 
pellet would be in an internal fatuous dance 
of revolutions, the life on it blind and 
ignorant of all other life outside its own 
atmosphere. 

But out of this cul-de-sac there is one 
glorious escape — Death, a way out of Time 
and space. As long as we go on living, we 
are as stupid and as caged as these dancing 
rats with diseased semicircular canals that 
incessantly run round and round in circles. 



A LAST DIARY 35 

But if we be induced to remain in this cul- 
de-sac, there is always an alleviative in 
communication and communion with our 
fellows. Men need each other badly in this 
world. The stars are crushing, but mankind 
in the mass is even above the stars — how far 
above, Death may show, perhaps to our 
surprise. 

But if I go on, I shall come round to the 
conviction that life is beer and skittles. 
Cheerio ! . . . This is not written in despair 
— " despair is a weakening of faith, hope in 
God." But I am tired and in need of relief. 
Death tantalises iny curiosity, and some- 
times I feel I could kill myself just to satisfy 
it. But I agree that Death, save as the only 
solution, is merely a funk-hole. 

Boxing Day, 1918. — James Joyce is my 
man (in the Forti^ait of the Artist as a Young 
Man). Here is a writer who tells the truth 
about himself It is almost impossible to 
tell the truth. In this journal I have tried, 
but I have not succeeded. I have set down 
a good deal, but I cannot tell it. Truth of 



36 A LAST DIARY 

self has to be left by the psychology-miner 
at the bottom of his boring. Perhaps 
fifty or a hundred years hence Posterity 
may be told, but Contemporary will never 
know. See how soldiers deliberately, from 
a mistaken sense of charity or decency, 
conceal the horrors of this war. Publishers 
and Government aid and abet them. Yet a 
good cinema film of all the worst and most 
filthy and disgusting side of the war — every- 
one squeamish and dainty-minded to attend 
under State compulsion to have their necks 
scrofFed, their sensitive nose-tips pitched into 
it, and their rest on lawny couches disturbed 
for a month after — would do as much to 
prevent future wars as any League of 
Nations. 

It is easy to reconcile oneself to man's 
sorrows by shutting the eyes to them. But 
there is no satisfaction in so easy a victory. 
How many people have been jerry-building 
their faith and creed all their lives by this 
method 1 One breath of truth and honest 
self-dealing would blow the structure down 



A LAST DIARY 37 

like a house of cards. The opthnist and 
believer must bear in mind such things as 
the CCS. described by M. Duhamel, 
or this from M. Latzko's Men in 
Battle : 

" The captain raised himself a little, and 
saw the ground and a broad dark shadow 
that Weixler cast. Blood ? He was 
bleeding ? Or what ? Surely that was 
blood. It couldn't be anything but blood. 
And yet it stretched out so peculiarly, and 
drew itself up like a thin thread to Weixler, 
up to where his hand pressed his body as 
though he wanted to pull up the roots that 
bound him to the earth. 

" The captain had to see. He pulled his 
head farther out from under the mound — 
and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite 
horror. The wretched man was dragging 
his entrails behind him." 

The reviewer suggests that the book should 
be read by school-children in every school in 
the world ! I should like to take it (and I 
hope it is large and heavy) and bring it down 



38 A LAST DIARY 

on the heads of the heartless, unimaginative 
mob, who would then have to look at it, if 
only to see what it was that cracked down 
on their skulls so heavily. 

Certainly Joyce has chosen the easier 
method of transferring his truth of self to a 
fictional character, thus avoiding recognition. 
I have failed in the method urged by 
Tolstoi in the diary of his youth : " Would 
it not be better to say " (he asks), " * This is 
the kind of man I am ; if you do not like 
me, I am sorry, but God made me so ' ? . . . 
Let every man show just what he is, and 
then what has been weak and laughable in 
him will become so no longer." Tolstoi 
himself did not live up to this. He con- 
fessed to his diary, but he kept his diary to 
himself. Some of my weaknesses I publish, 
and no doubt you say at once " self- 
advertisement." I agree more or less, but 
believe egotisvi is a diagnosis nearer the 
mark. I do not aspire to Tolstoi's ethical 
motives. Mine are intellectual. I am the 
scientific investigator of myself, and if the 



A LAST DIARY 39 

published researches bring me into notice, I 
am not averse from it, though interest in my 
work comes first. 

Did not Sir Thomas Browne say ever so 
long ago : " We carry within us the wonders 
we seek without us ; there is all Africa and 
her prodigies in us . . . "? 



1919 



I 



1919 

January 1st, 1919. — My dear Arthur ! — if 
it's a boy, call him Andrew Chatto Windus. 
Then perhaps the firm will give him a 
royalty when he is published at the font. 

My life here has quite changed its orienta- 
tion. I am no longer an intellectual snob. 
If I were, E. and I would have parted ere 
now. I never liked to take her to the B.M. 
(in my petty way) because there all the values 
are intellectual. 

1 write this by candlelight in bed. In 
the room above E. is in bed with 'flu. We 
have had days of cold rain, and just now it 
drips drearily off the roof, and the wind 
blows drearily in gusts round the cottage as 
if tired of blowing, and as if blowing 
prospects were nothing to be roaring 
about. 

43 



44 A LAST DIARY 



Wilson 

President Wilson is my hero. I worship 
him. I could ask him to stamp across my 
prostrate body to save getting his feet wet 
in a puddle. But 1 know nothing about him 
save what I read in the Nation, and I don't 
want to. Supposing I discovered traits . . . ? 
I have had enough of disenchantment to last 
me a lifetime. If he is not the greatest 
figure in modern history, then there's no 
money in Wall Street. 

January ^rd, 1919. — She taxes me with 
indifference, says my sympathy is cold. By 
God 1 this is hard to bear. But she is so 
desperate, she is lunging out right and 
left at all. I fear for her mental balance. 
What's going to happen to us ? Why does 
everyone seem to have forsaken us ? Ah ! it 
is almost too hard for me to bear. And I 
can't break down. I am like ice. I can't 
melt. I had a presentiment of evil awaiting 
us about now. I don't know why, unless 



A LAST DIARY 45 

long experience of it produces a nose for it, 
so that I can smell it in advance. 

January Mh, 1919, — I have talked of 
being in love with ones own ruin, Bashkirt- 
sefF of liking to suffer, to be in despair. 
Light, frivolous talk. At the most, such 
moods are only short lulls between the 
spasms of agony of suffering ; one longs to 
be free of them as of acute physical pain, to 
be unconscious. I look forward to night, 
to darkness, rest, and sleep. I sleep well 
between twelve and six and then watch the 
dawn, from black (and the owl's hoot) to 
grey (and the barncock's crow) to white (and 
the blackbirds' whistle). The oak beam on 
my ceiling, the Japanese print on the wall 
come slowly into view, and I dread them. 
T dread the day with my whole soul. Each 
dawn is hopeless. Yes, it is true, they have 
not buried me deep enough. I don't think I 
am buried at all. They have not even taken 
me down from the tree. And my wife they 
are just nailing up. I can never forget, 
wherever I may be, in Heaven or Hell, her 



46 A LAST DIARY 

figure in dressing-gown and shawl drawn up 
erect — but swaying because she is so weak — 
before me at the fireside (she had just been 
bending over me and kissing me, hot cheeks 
and hot tears that mingled and bound us 
together to that moment for ever), her head 
tilted towards the ceiling, and her poor face 
looking so ill and screwed up as she half- 
whispered : " Oh, God ! it's so hopeless." 
I think that picture is impressed even on the 
four walls of the room, its memory is 
photographed on the air to haunt those who 
may live here in the time to come. I said : 
"Fight it out, dear. Don't give in. I 
believe in a personal devil. The human 
spirit is unconquerable. You'll come 
through if you fight." It was but a few 
weeks ago that she came home one evening, 
dug out from a drawer her beautiful dance 
dress, got into it, and did a pas seul for my 
pleasure round the little cottage room. 
That ogre Fate was drawing out her golden 
wing and mocking her loss of liberty. Ah ! 
the times we intended to have together ! 



A LAST DIARY 47 

January Stk, 1919. — I lie stiff and con- 
torted till Nurse arrives at nine-thirty. She 
straightens me out and bolsters me up. 
Breakfast at nine. Cigarettes while I listen 
with ravenous ears for the postman. No 
letter for me, then plop right down into the 
depth among the weeds and goblins of the 
deep sea for an hour. There usually is no 
letter for me. 

My chief discovery in sickness and mis- 
fortune is the callousness of people to our 
case — not from hard-heartedness (everyone 
is kind), but from absence of sympathetic 
imagination. People don't know the horrors 
and they can't imagine them — perhaps they 
are unimaginable. You will notice how 
suicides time and again in farewell notes to 
their closest and dearest have the same 
refrain, " I don't believe even you can realise 
all I suffer." Poor devil ! of course not. 
Beyond a certain point, suffering must be 
borne alone, and so must extreme joy. Ah ! 
we are lonely barks. 

Januai^y 13th, 1919. — All the postman 



48 A LAST DIARY 

brought me to-day was an income-tax 
form ! 

Last night — Nurse (having put me back 
to bed). — Shall I shut up your legs ? 

B. — No, thank you. They've been bent 
up all the evening, and it's a relief to have 
them out straight. 

Later — B. — Before you go you might 
uncross my legs. 

(She pulls bed-clothes back, seizes my 
feet, one in each hand, and forces them 
apart, chanting humorously : "Any scissors 
to grind ?" As I have pointed out to her, 
the sartorius muscle, being on the inside of 
the thigh and stronger than the others, has 
the effect of crossing my legs when a tetanic 
spasm occurs.) 

N. — There, good-night. 

B. — And a good-night to you. 

N. — I'll come in first thing in the morning. 

\_Exit. 

I lie on my back and rest awhile. Then 
I force myself on to the left side by putting 
my right arm over the left side of the bed 



A LAST DIARY 49 

beneath the wood-work and pulling (my 
right arm is stronger than any of the other 
limbs). To-night, Nurse had not placed me 
in the middle of the bed (I was too much 
over on the right side), so even my long arm 
could not reach down beneath the wood- 
work on the left. I cursed Nanny for a 
scabby old bean, struggled, and at last got 
over on my left side. The next thing was 
to get my legs bent up — now out as stiff 
and straight as ferrules. When lying on the 
left side I long ago found out that it is 
useless to get my right leg up first, as it only 
shoots out again when I come to grapple 
with the left. So I put my right arm down, 
seized the left leg just above the knee and 
pulled ! The first result is always a violent 
spasm in the legs and back. But I hang on 
and presently it dies away, and the leg 
begins to move upward a little. Last night 
Nanny uncrossed my legs, but was not 
careful to separate them. Consequently, 
knee stuck side by side to knee, and foot to 
foot, as if glued, and I found, in pulling at my 

4 



50 A LAST DIARY 

left, I had the stubborn live weight of both 
to lift up. I would get them part way, then 
by a careless movement of the hand on a 
ticklish spot both would shoot out again. 
So on for an hour — my only relief to curse 
Nanny. 

And thus, any time, any week, these 
last eighteen months. But I have faith 
and hope and love in spite of all. I forgive 
even Nanny ! 

January 19th, 1919. — The situation is 
eased. E. is at Brighton for a change, and 
has P. with her (she came up from Wales 
with the nurse after seven months' visit). 
But I am heartsore and unhappy. 

January 20t/i, 1919. — If I were to sum 
up my life in one word I should say 
suffocation. R. has been my one blow- 
hole. Now I look forward to a little 
oxygen when my Journal is published ! I 
am delighted and horrified at the same 
time. What will my relatives say ? 'Twill 
be the surprise of their lives. I regard it as 
a revanche. The world has always gagged 



A LAST DIARY 51 

and suppressed me — now I turn and hit it 
in the belly. 

Januarij 22nd, 1919. — Am now lodging 
alone under one roof with Nanny 1 Makes 
me think of some of Sterne's adventures in 
the Sentimental Journey, only I must shut 
my eyes very tight to see the likeness and 
imagine very hard. This is a selection from 
last night's conversation (remember she is 
deaf, old, and obstinate ; she hates to 
be instructed or corrected ; hence her 
ignorance and general incapacity) : 

Ornithology 

N. — I think a sparrow out at the back has 
young birds, by the way she carries off the 
food. 

B. — It's too early for young sparrows. 
A sparrow is too worldly wise to encumber 
himself with a young family in January, or 
in February or March for that matter. 

N. — I've seen young sparrows in March. 

B. — Why didn't you write to the papers 
about it ? 



52 A LAST DIARY 

N. —There wasn't so much writing to the 
papers in my days. But there were things 
I could have written about. Young 
plovers, for example, I used to catch and 
hold in my lap. You know the plover? 
It's called the lapwing sometimes ; only a 
few young at a time 

B.— Four. 

N. — Yes. Now Charlie used to show me 
partridges' nests with as many as twenty- 
four. 

B. — Yes, but laid probably by more than 
one hen. 

N. — Charlie said it was all one bird. The 
prettiest nest he ever showed me was a 
greenfinch's. 

B. — What was that like ? 

N. — It was swung underneath the bough 
of a fir-tree right at the end. 

B. — That was not a greenfinch's. 

N. — Well, Charlie said it was, and he 
showed it to all of us ; we all saw it, 

B. — It was the nest of a goldcrest. 

N. — Yes ? Charlie had a wonderful col- 



A LAST DIARY 53 

lection of eggs. He could name them all, 
and labelled the names on them. They 
would cover the table when all set out. 

B.— Yes ? 

N. — Oh, I forgot, another nest he showed 
me — a kingfisher's. 

B.— What was that like ? 

N. — It was right down among some reeds 
of a stream. 

B. — What were the eggs like ? 

N. — There were no eggs in it when I saw 
it. Another pretty 

B. — That was not a kingfisher's nest. A 
kingfisher nests at the end of a hole in the 
bank of the stream. 

N. — Charlie said it was. Another pretty 
nest was the robin's. 

B. — The prettiest nest of all, I think, is 
the long-tailed tit's. 

N. — Oh, yes, I know that. 

B.— What's it like ? 

N. — I can't recollect. 

B. — All arched over with sticks and lined 
with green leaves ? 



54 A LAST DIARY 

N, — Oh, yes. 

I suspect " Charlie " (whoever he was) 
could not tell a hawk from a handsaw, even 
when the wind was southerly. Now what a 
stupid old woman not to make better use 
of me ! 

January 237'd, 1919. — Have been sustain- 
ing a hell of tedium by reading a sloppy 
novel — sentimental mucilage — called Con- 
7'ad in Quest of His Youth, which sent me 
in quest of mine. I see now that my youth 
was over before I came to London. For 
never after did I experience such electric 

tremors of joy and fear as, e.g., over . 

As a small boy I knew her, and always 
lifted my hat. But one day at the age of 
sixteen, with a heart like nascent oxygen 
(though I did not know it), I lifted my hat 
and, in response to her smile, fell violently 
in love. During country rambles I liked to 
pause and carve her initials on the bark of a 
tree. It pleased me to confide my burning 
secret to the birds and wild things. I knew 
it was safe in their keeping. And I always 



A LAST DIARY 55 

hoped she might come along one day and 
see the letters there, and feel curiosity, yet 
she couldn't find out. ... I daresay they 
are still legible in places, some of them of 
exquisite rural beauty ; though the letters 
themselves probably now look obscured and 
distorted by the evergrowing bark, the trees 
and locality doubtless are still as beautiful : 

" Upon a poet's page I wrote 
Of old two letters of her name ; 
Part seemed she of the effulgent thought 
Whence that high singer's rapture came. 
When now I turn the leaf the same 
Immortal light illumes the lay, 
But from the letters of her name 
The radiance has waned away." 

For a whole year I was in agony, meeting 
her constantly in the town, but never daring 
to stop and speak. I used to return home 
after a short cap-lifting encounter with an 
intolerable ache that I did not understand. 
Even in subsequent miseries I do not 
believe I suffered mental pain equal to this 
in acuteness. I used to lift my cap to her 
in the High Street, then dart down a side- 



56 A LAST DIARY 

street and around, so as to meet her again, 
and every time I met her came a raging 
stormy conflict between fear and desire. I 
wanted to stop — my heart always failed me. 
How I cursed myself for a poltroon the 
very next moment I 

I always haunted all the localities — park, 
concerts, skating-rink — where I thought to 
see her. In church on Sundays I became 
electrified if she was there. One afternoon 
at a concert in company with my sister, I 
determined on a bold measure : I left before 
it was over — saw my sister home, and at 
once darted back to the hall and met my 
paragon coming out. She was with her 
friend (how I hated her !) and her friend's 
mother (how I feared her I) I was seven- 
teen, she was seventeen, and of ravishing, 
virginal beauty. I spoke. I said (obviously) : 
" How did you enjoy the concert ?" 

While the other two walked on, she 
replied " Very much." That was all. I 
could think of nothing more, so I left her, 
and she rejoined her friends. It had been a 



A LAST DIARY 57 

terrible nervous strain to me. At the crucial 
second my nose twitched and I felt my face 
contorted. But I walked home on air and 
my soul sang like a bird. It was the beau- 
tiful rhapsody of a boy. There was nothing 
carnal in it. Indeed, the poor girl was 
idealised aloft into something scarcely 
human. But that at the moment of speak- 
ing to her I was in the power of an unpre- 
cedented emotion is obvious if I write that 
neither before nor after has anything ever 
caused facial twitching. It is evidence of 
my ardour and youth. 

Our acquaintance remained tenuous for 
long. I was shy and inexperienced. I was 
too shy to write. I heard rumours that she 
was staying by the sea, so I went down and 
wandered about to try to see her. In vain. 
I went down another day, and it began to 
pour with rain. So I spent all my time 
sheltering under doorways and shop awn- 
ings, cursing my luck, and groaning at the 
waste of my precious time. " There was a 
large halil)ut on a fishmonger's stall," I 



58 A LAST DIARY 

posted in my diary, "but not caught, I 
think, off this coast." Then follows ab- 
ruptly : 

" A daughter of the gods she walked, 
Divinely tall, and most divinely fair." 

I bought a local paper in the High Street, 
and, examining the " Visitors' List," I went 
through hundreds of names, and at the end 
saw " The most recent arrivals will be found 
on page 5." 1 turned to page 5 and found 
nothing there. I complained to the 
manager. " Ah, yes, I know, an unfor- 
tunate oversight, sir. If you will leave 
your name and address, I will see it appears 
in next week's issue." I felt silly, and 
slunk off, saying : " Oh, never mind. I 
don't care much about it." 

"It is the more worrying to me because 
I know — 

(1) It is wasting good time. 

(2) A common occurrence to others, and 
they all get over it. 

(3) There is no comfort in study or 
reading. Knowledge is dull and dry. 



A LAST DIARY 59 

Poetry seems to me to be more attrac- 
tive." 

Then immediately follows a description 
of a ring snake with notes on its anatomy. 
Then a few days later : " Have not seen my 
beloved all the week. Where on earth has 
she been hiding herself?" And again: "I 
cannot hope ever to see more wonderful 
eyes — of the richest, sweetest brown-amber, 
soft, yet bright." At length we became 
friends, wrote letters to one another (her 
first one was an event), and went for walks. 

Of course, the next stage was kissing her. 
It took me over another twelve months to 
kiss her. I must have been close on nine- 
teen. We had been walking in the woods 
all the afternoon, then had tea in the garden 
tea-rooms. We sat in the green arbour till 
after dark. I was in a terrible state. Rest- 
lessness and fever were exhausting me. 
Desire struggled with pride. What if she 
smacked my face? Then I lit a cigarette 
for her (I used to buy her httle heUotrope 
boxes of cigarettes labelled in gold " My 



60 A LAST DIARY 

Darling"). Greatly daring, I put my left 
arm round her neck, and holding the match- 
box, struck a light and kissed her at the 
same moment. She said, " 1 ought not to 
let you really," quite calm. I was in too 
much of a turmoil to answer, but kissed her 
again. 

I kissed her many times after that. One 
wet afternoon we had spent kissing in a 
linhay by a country lane. Coming home, 
we met her sister's baby, and she stopped to 
lean over the pram, and crow. This irritated 
me, and I strolled on. " Do you like 
babies ?" I asked when she came up. " Yes," 
she answered, " do you ?" " Not much," 
said I with dryness, and changed what I felt 
to be almost an indelicate subject. After 
all, a baby is only a kiss carried to a rational 
conclusion, in natural sequence, sometimes 
arithmetical, sometimes geometrical. It de- 
pends on the length of the engagement. 

But it was curious how this kissing 
destroyed my ideal. I soon knew I was 
not in love. With callous self-possession I 



A LAST DIARY 61 

was investigating a new sensation, and found 
it very enjoyable. " 1 kiss you" I said to 
her one night in the park, "but you never 
kiss me." She at once gave me a passionate 
token on my Ups, and having exacted thus 
much tribute, I sank into complacency, self- 
adulation, and, ultimately, indifference. I 
had been swxhai'ged. The relief was too 
complete. After exchanging impassioned 
verses (oh, such tosh !), each other's photo- 
graphs, and plenty of letters, my romance 
died a natural death. My agony and sweat 
became a trifle, and one I wished to blot 
from my memory out of boyish sense of 
shame. 

Doubtless I broke her heart. She had 
left the town, when one morning I received 
a last pathetic appeal. I remember now 
the nausea that love-letter caused me. 1 
put it on the fire, and thought, " Heavens 
what a fool the girl is !" In 1913 I met her 
igain, and had the effrontery to go to her 
lome and have dinner with her people. 
;See May 31st and June 3rd, 1913.) 



62 A LAST DIARY 

Now, in my old age, I like to gaze back 
on this flashing gem of youth. It still 
reflects the light, and she is a princess 
again. " Love in the Valley " becomes a 
personal memory instead of someone else's 
poem. 

Ah I what a heart I had in those days ! 
a nascent oxygen with an affinity for every 
pretty girl who smiled at me. I fell in 
love with a post-office girl, a silversmith's 
daughter, a grocer's daughter, the daughter 

of a judge. For months I worshipped , 

and bought every kind of photograph of 
her. But I've never seen her in my life, 
and now she's Dead Sea fruit. I had never 
set eyes on any beautiful women until 1 
came to London. Then I was dazzled by 
them all — in every rank or station, in the 
street or on the street, in the Cafe de 
I'Europe or the Cafe Royal — pretty, laugh- 
ing girls, handsome women, or beautiful 
pieces of mere flesh only. ... I was 
doomed to destruction from the first. If 
I had not developed disease, if I had 



A LAST DIARY 63 

come up from the country a healthy, lusty 
youth, I must soon have got on the rocks. 
Now that the blood is slow, it is difficult to 
recall the anguish. That I only succumbed 
twice is a marvel to me and a joy. My 
situation at one time was fraught with dire 
possibilities. My secret life was a tumult. 
I never went skylarking with jaunty pals in 
the West End. I crept along the streets 
alone ... all this time I was alone, in 
dirty diggings, by myself. I am consumed 
with self-pity at the thought. 

I cannot understand how saints like 
Augustine and Tolstoi confess how they 
went with women in their youth, but recall 
no sense of nausea. They just deplore their 
moral lapse. When St. Augustine's mother 
enjoined him never to lie with his neighbour's 
wife, he laughed at the advice as womanish ! 

For myself, I never received any parental 
instruction. I first learned of the wonder 
of generation through the dirty filter of a 
barmaid's nasty mind. 

I remember — — telling me in sardonic 



64 A LAST DIARY 

vein that the only advice his father ever 
gave him on leaving home was to keep his 
bowels open. The present generation has 
altered all that. 

Birds' eggs were another electrifying 
factor in my youth. I can remember 
tramping to and fro all one warm June 
afternoon over a bracken- covered sandy 
waste, searching for a nightjar's eggs. H. 
and I quartered out the ground systematic- 
ally, till presently, after two hours' search, 
the hen goat-sucker flipped up at my feet 
and fluttered away like a big moth across 
the silvery bracken out of sight. Lying 
before me on the ground were two long, 
grey eggs, marbled like pebbles. I turned 
away from this intoxicating vision, flicking 
my fingers as if I had been bitten. Then I 
turned, approached slowly, and gloated. 

It was just such an effect on me as a 
girl's beautiful face used to make — equally 
tantalising and out of reach. I stared, 
fingered them, put one to my lips. Then 
it was over. I had to leave them, and an 



A LAST DIAKY 65 

equal thrill at goat-suckers' eggs could 
never return again. 



The Cottage on the Shore 

January 24M, 1919. — It was as mysterious 
as Stevenson's Pavilion on the Links. For a 
long time T never noticed any indication of 
its being inhabited, save a few chickens at 
the back which no one seemed to feed. I 
could see it from miles around, as it was situ- 
ated in a desolate, treeless waste, thousands 
of acres of marshes and duckponds (known 
as the Mires) on the one side, and on the 
other a wilderness of sandy links and sand- 
hills swarming with rabbits (known as the 
Burrows). Immediately in front, the 
waters of a broad tidal estuary came up 
almost to the door during spring tides. 
The nearest human habitation was the 
lighthouse, a mile away round the corner 
on the sands near the harbour bar. In my 
rambles in search of bird or beast, I used 
occasionally, while eating sandwiches at 

5 



66 A LAST DIARY 

midday on a sandhill top, to turn my field- 
glasses on the cottage idly. For long I 
saw no one. Then one spring, while 
thousands of lapwings circled above my 
head, calling indignantly at me " Little 
boo-oy," and larks dotted the blue sky 
everywhere in little white-hot needle-points 
of song, I saw a tiny man — a manikin — 
come out of this tiny cottage — a doll's 
house — and throw some corn to the chickens. 
He was three miles away, and by the time 
that I arrived at the cottage, the little man 
had disappeared. It was a little four-roomed 
cottage, with no path leading up to it, no 
garden, no enclosure, only a few hardy 
shrubs to keep the sandy soil from drifting. 
For a long time I never saw him again, and 
began to think he had been an hallucination. 
But the desolate cottage was still there and 
the chickens were still alive, so they must 
have been fed. Then one day I ran up 
against him on the Mires, and we exchanged 
greetings. He was a round, tubby, shorty 
man with a stubble of beard. Devon folk l 



A LAST DIARY 67 

would have called him bungy, stuggy. His 
face bore a ludicrous resemblance to the 
monkey in the " Monkey Brand "' advertise- 
ment, only fatter and rounder. We dis- 
cussed birds (he was the gamekeeper) and 
became fast friends. He would take me 
the round of his duckponds, and sometimes 
he sent me a postcard when there were 
wild swans or geese " in over," or when he 
had discovered a "stranger" on his water. 

But this did not dispel the mystery of 
the cottage. For he had a woman inside 
whose presence was never suspected until I 
had occasion to knock at the door. There 
was no answer and no sound. All the 
windows were shut. I knocked again, and 
heard a distant noise. Then there were 
long, preparatory noises, as if someone were 
climbing up from an underground cellar or 
cave, or wandering down a long, dark 
1 passage. Bolts were drawn (and powerful 
I enough they sounded to make fast a port- 
cullis), and I watched the door opening 
f with curiosity ; a tall, fat, middle - aged 



68 A LAST DIARY 

woman stood there blinking at me like an 
owl unaccustomed to daylight. Her eyes 
were weak blue, and her face puffy and red. 

" Oh ! is Fedder about ?" I enquired. 

Without changing a muscle of her face, 
she replied mechanically : 

" No, but Fedder said if the young 
gentleman called, I was to say that the 
shovellers brought off their brood all right." 

I thanked her and departed, as she was 
obviously embarrassed. In her moping 
countenance I detected a startled look — 
Robinson Crusoe, as it were, discovering 
Friday all at once without any advertising 
Friday. I heard her bolting the door again, 
as I strolled off down by the waterside to 
examine the tide-wrack. It was almost 
eerie to hear the cackle of herring gulls 
overhead. They seemed to be laughing at 
the stupidity of human nature. 

There are some things the imagination 
boggles at. For example, what did that 
woman in that desolate cottage do ? What 
did she think about ? What were her 



A LAST DIARY 69 

wants, her grievances ? Where were her 
relatives ? Did she ever love, or want little 
babies ? Did murder stories interest her at 
all ? Drugs ? That is an easy explanation 
— to jump at some horrible vice. Theatrical. 
In reality I should have found, I expect, the 
answer would be just nothing at all. She 
did nothing, thought nothing, perhaps only 
feared a little, so she always bolted the door 
and hid herself away. I suppose if one saw 
nothing bigger than a kingplover or a seagull 
during the twelve months, and heard no 
noises other than the trumpet of wild 
swans and the cries of Fedder's wild fowl, a 
tall man six feet high, with a voice like a 
human being's, must seem a little dis- 
concerting. 

January 2M, 1919. — Here is some 
arithmetic which ought to please me. But 
it doesn't. 1 wrote : 

12 papers in the Zoologist in the years 
1905-1910; 6 in the P.Z.S. (1912- 
1916) ; 7 in the Annals and Magazine 



70 A LAST DIARY 

of Natural History (1912-1916) ; 3 
in Bulletin of Eiitomological Reseaj'ch; 
2 B.M. pamphlets, in addition to 18 
literary efforts (some in newspapers 
and some not published), and other 
old scientific papers in different 
periodicals such as British Birds, the 
Journal of Animal Behaviour, etc. 
In all Q5 publications. 

Further, in my locker lie : 

6 unpublished literary MSS. 

17 volumes of Journal post quarto, pre- 
war Is. thickness. 

12 smaller volumes written in boyhood. 

6 volumes (post quarto Is.) of abstracted 
entries from the Journal. 

2j post quarto volumes of abstract, 
abstracted from the volumes of 
abstract for publication purposes. 

In vulgar parlance, cacoethes scribendi. 
January 27th, 1919. — Have you ever 
considered what a fever of anticipation 



A LAST DIARY 71 

must be raging in me as I sit by the fire, 
day after day, awaiting the constantly 
delayed publication of this my Journal ; how 
I strain to hold it, to smell the fresh ink, to 
hear the binding crackle as I open it out, 
and above all to read what one of the fore- 
most literary men thinks about me and my 
book. 

I wait with head on the block for my 
child to be brought to receive my farewell 
blessings. 

Will it come in time ? 1 nearly died last 
month of 'flu, and get worse almost daily. I 
am running a neck-and-neck race up the 
straight with my evil genius on the black 
horse. It is touch and go who wins ; and if 
I do, I expect some horrible forfeit will be 
exacted of me, a penalty will have to be 
paid — Use - majeste — for my audacity in 
challenging the stars in their courses and 
defeating them. 

My life has certainly been an astonishing 
episode in human story. To me, it appears 
as a titanic struggle between consuming 



72 A LAST DIARY 

ambition and adverse fortune. Behold a 
penniless youth thirsting for knowledge intro- 
duced into the world out of sheer devilment, 
hundreds of miles from a university, with a 
towering ambition, but cursed with ill-health 
and a twofold nature — pleasure-loving as 
well as labour- loving. The continuous, 
almost cunning frustration of my endeavours 
long ago gave me a sense of struggle with 
some evil genius. Think of the elaborate 
precautions I took of my MSS. during the 
air-raids ! I saw each bomb labelled 
" Barbellion's contemptible ambition." 
Consider the duplication of abstracts — 1 
saw an army of housemaids prowling round 
to throw them on the fire after Carlyle's 
French devolution. 1 have been consciously 
contesting with an incendiary, a bomber 
from Hunland, a wicked housemaid, a whole 
world of wicked folk, in league with a 
hostile spirit decided on killing and obliter- 
ating me and my ambition — a grotesque 
couple, a monkey astride a IiippogrifF, 
an ass with a Jabberwock! True, he has 



A LAST DIARY 73 

ruined me ; yet the struggle is not over. 
With demoniac determination, I am 
getting on still, crawling on all fours, with 
the dagger between my teeth. I am 
mauled, battered, scorched, but not slain. 
The dagger I hope to see published 
by Messrs. Chatto and Windus next 
month. 

You can search all history and fiction 
for an ambition more powerful than mine 
and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor 
Wilhelm II, nor Keats. No, I am not proud 
of it, not at all. The wonder is that I 
remain sane, the possessed of such a demon. 
I am sane or I could not make fun of it as 
I do. Ah ! my God ! it is a ridiculous 
weakness, but the leopard cannot change 
his spots, and I feel just as hopelessly 
spotty as a leopard, 

January 28th, 1919.— "The rest is 
silence" — I should like this inscribed at 
the end of this garrulous Journal, an in- 
scription for the base of my self-erected 
monument. 



74 A LAST DIARY 



ROWBOTHAM, THE MoDERN HOMER 

January 30tk, 1919. — The Human Epic ; 
The Twelfth Epic Poem, of the World; The 
Story of the Universe and Prehistoric Man; 
The Vanished Continent in the Atlantic; 
The Ice Age ; The Anemones, Corals, and 
Population of the Primeval Ocean (" These 
latter cantos have been made the subject of 
interesting lectures" — The Bard); Other 
Epics by liozvbotham, the Modern Homer ; 
God and the Devil; The Swiss Lake 
Dwellers ; The Epic of the Empire ; 
London; Charlemagne. Each Epic 2s. 6d. 
Foyle, 121, Charing Cross Road. 

Who is "The Bard"? What a safe 
remark to make about the anemones and 
corals ! Who is Rowbotham ? I wish 
someone would lecture to me on him. 
What are the " other epics of the world "? 
The twelfth has the suggestion of quack 
verse sold as a green liquid from a four- 
wheeled vehicle at a country fair. But I 
can't run to 2s. 6d., though I ache to read 
and know you, O Rowbotham ! Rowbotham, 



A LAST DIARY 75 

the late 3f?\ Homer, I suppose. Say, though, 
who is this Rowbotham ? 

Snow hes on the ground outside. All the 
morning it was too dark in my vault to read. 
Even had it been light, my eyesight had 
become temporarily too deranged for me to 
see the print. Had my eyes been all right, 
it was so cold that I had to keep my hands 
under the bedclothes. 

All the afternoon I dozed. In the even- 
ing I sat by the fire and read Uim-burial. 
During the day, at long intervals, Nanny 
comes in, and I shout out fatuities — e.g., 
" Still snowing," or " Colder than ever." 

There are some days when I give up, 
surrender voluntarily every earthly desire, 
when every thread binding me to life is cut. 
I long to be free, and hack and cut in a 
frenzy — frenzies in which I curse and swear 
out loud to myself, alternating with fits 
of terrible apathy, when I am indifferent to 
everything and everybody, when the petty 
routine of my existence, washing, eating, 
and sitting out, goes on and carries me along 



76 A LAST DIARY 

with it mechanically. And I wonder all 
the time why on earth 1 trouble about it. 
I look at human life and human affairs with 
inhuman detachment, yet not from the side 
of the angels. I am neither one thing nor 
the other, neither dead nor alive, a nonde- 
script creature in a No-Man's Land, and, 
like all who keep a middle course, not 
claimed with any enthusiasm by either side. 
The living must be tired of me, and the 
dead don't seem eager for my reception. 
Yet I must go somewhere, and by heavens 1 
I will not choose willingly, God knows, 
the bare heath of this world. The bare 
bodkin is an alluring symbol to lonely 
paralytics, meaning liberty, fraternity, peace. 
Ever since 1 came into it, I have felt an 
alien in this life — a refugee by reason of 
some pre-natal extradiction. I always felt 
alien to my father and mother. I was 
different from them. I knew and was 
conscious of the detachment. They seemed 
the children and I was a very old man. 
My father's youth, which continued to 



A LAST DIARY 77 

flower past middle-age and in the midst 
of adversity and terrible affliction, and his 
courage and happiness of soul I admired 
greatly. But we were very far from one 
another. I was proud and irritable. My 
mother I loved, and she loved us all with an 
instant love and tenderness such as I have 
never seen in any mother since. I did not 
realise this at the time, alas ! Her love 
helped to wear her out. She never parted 
from me for however short a period with- 
out tears — tears certainly of weakness — 
especially later, of sheer inability to stand 
steady any longer against the bufFetings of a 
hard lot. But we had little in common. I 
was a queer duckling, self-willed and de- 
termined at the water's edge, heedless of her 
frantic " clucks." Dear soul I " If you be- 
have so," she would warn me sorrowfully, 
" no one, you know, will like you when you 
go out into the world." *' I don't care," I 
would answer. " I don't want them to like 
me. I shan't like them. Theirs would be 
the greater loss." Ours was a family — not 



78 A LAST DIARY 

uncommon I imagine, at any time — in 
which the parents were under the tolerant 
surveillance and patronage of the children. 

1 was a little alien among my school- 
fellows. I knew I was different, and accepted 
my ostracism as a quite natural consequence. 
I never played games with them, but after 
afternoon school hurried home, gobbled 
down an early tea (prepared for me in the 
kitchen by Martha), and went off on a long 
solitary ramble till nightfall (and later 
sometimes), through orchards of very old 
crooked trees ; the air reeking of garlic or 
humming with the scoldings of tits whose 
nests I was after in the holes in trees ; 
through gorse-covered thickets, over streams, 
in woods, disturbing the game — I went 
across country, avoiding lanes, roads, and 
footpaths as if they were God-forsaken. 

I never entered into any intimacy with 
my masters. They and the boys regarded 
me quizzically with a menacing " Now then, 
Barbellion, where are you sloping off to ?" 
I would flush, and parry with them with 



A LAST DIARY 79 

" I've got to be home early to-night." It 
was a He. I knew it was a lie. They knew 
it was a lie. But I presented such an 
invertebrate, sloppy, characterless exterior, 
that no one felt curious enough to probe 
further into my way of life. And I was 
content to leave it at that. 

It was the same in London. I was alien 
to my colleagues and led a private life, 
totally outside their imaginings. Among 
them only R., dear fellow, has ventured to 
approach my life, and seek a communion 
with me. And I can't believe he has 
suffered any hurt. I am not a live wire. 
Now at all events my power station is dis- 
mantled, my career a cinder-path. I wish 
1 could think that others who have come 
near me are similarly immune. My wife 
and child seem at a remote distance from 
me. Strange to say, 1 am calmer in mind 
when they are away, as now. Would that 
they could go on with their lives as if I had 
never been. E. is a dear woman. I love 
: her, and she, I hope, loves me a little. She 



80 A LAST DIARY 

is my wife, and it is my child, and my 
dreamy ineffectual existence, poised between 
earth and heaven, cannot annul the physical 
contact. They may be dream figures, but 
1 created them, and am responsible. For- 
give me, forgive me, and try to think well of 
me. I am weak, and this great universe is a 
bully. This disease has weakened the fibre 
of my life. Existence blows me about any- 
where. I am possessed by any idle devil 
who cares to take me, give me a shake, and 
pass on : forebodings and evil visions, 
imaginary pictures of horrible accidents, 
cataclysms, fears — fears that the earth may 
drop into the sun. 

February 3rd, 1919. — Suffering does not 
only insulate. It drops its victim on an 
island in an ocean desert where he sees men 
as distant ships passing. I not only feel 
alone, but very far away from you all. But 
what is my suffering ? Not physical pain. 
I have none. Pain brings clusters of one's 
fellows — a toothache is intelligible. But 
when I say I am grown tired of myself, 



A LAST DIARY 81 

have outlived myself, am unseasonable 
and " mopy " like a doomed swallow in 
November, it is something that requires a 
John Galsworthy to understand. The world 
to me is but a dream or mock show ; and we 
all therein but Pantalones and Anticks to 
my severe contemplations. This used to be 
a transitory impression that amused my 
curiosity. But it hurts and bewilders now 
that it has become the permanent com- 
plexion on my daily existence, when I long 
for real persons and real things. Tinsel and 
pictures are melancholy substitutes to any- 
one heart-hungry for the touch of real hands, 
and the sound of real voices. Acute mental 
pain at intervals seizes me with pincers and 
casts me helpless into the whirlpool — it may 
be E.'s despair, or the failure to find a home 
for me to go to. But these are spasms of 
reality, the momentary opening and closing 
pf a shutter on Life. As soon as they are 
I )ver, I at once relapse into the dull monotone 
I )f misery and picture-show. 

I have not left my room since Novem- 



82 A LAST DIAKY 

ber 11th. I eat well, sleep well, am in 
possession of all my higher faculties — those 
for feeling and thinking. But I can't get out. 

I think sometimes folk do not come to 
see me because I am such a gruesome object. 
It is not pleasant to feel you are gruesome. 
I have outstayed my welcome. I know 
everyone will be relieved to hear of my death 
— no doubt for my sake, as they will eagerly 
point out, but also for their own sake, as I 
believe. Yet now and then in selfish and 
ignoble moods, I, being an egotist, fancy I 
would like some loving hands to clutch at 
me, in a blind, ineffectual effort to save me in 
any condition, if only alive. 

February Mh, 1919. — The last part of 
yesterday's entry was maudlin tosh — entirely 
foreign to my nature. I hereby cancel it. 

The Day's Life 

I woke at seven, when my desk, the 
Japanese print on the wall, the wooden 
chair with my basin on it, the chest ofj 



A LAST DIARY 83 

drawers were emerging out of a grey ob- 
scurity. I had tetanuses of my legs (which 
alternately shot out straight and contracted 
up to my chin) till eight- thirty, when Nanny 
came in and drew the blinds, letting in a 
foggy light. It is bitterly cold. I hear 
noises in the kitchen — a dull mewing sound 
(this is the tap being turned on), then a 
scrape, scrape (she is buttering my toast). 

Then breakfast arrives (two pieces of toast 
and two cups of tea), for which I am set up 
in bed with pillows. Through the window 
on my left I can see the branch of a walnut- 
tree and beyond, a laurel. The little squares 
of ancient glass are so loosely fixed in the 
leads (one is broken and covered over with 
a piece of cardboard) that the draught pours 
through and sometimes makes wind enough 
to blow out my match for a cigarette. As 
I eat comes a heavy scrunch, scrunch, right 
up the front door, which is only a few feet 
away from me, concealed behind a curtain. 
It is the postman, who puts the letters in the 
porch, gives a resounding knock, and goes 



84 A LAST DIARY 

away again. As I smoke my cigarette 
there is another scrunch, scrunch, but this 
one goes round tot he back door. Ihere 
is a hammering on the door (they all know 
Nanny is deaf) and I hear a rough, throaty 
voice, saying, " Nearly copped him that 
time," and Nanny replying, " Yes, 'tis cold 
this morning." It is the newspaper man, 
who always shies half a brick at a rat that 
haunts our garden. 

While reading the Daily News I hear 
every now and then a distant rattle, which 
comes nearer, increases to a roar and passes 
off again in a furious rattle of sound — it is a 
motor-car along the Oxford Koad. Then 
I hear the clock at the Manor strike twelve, 
sparrows chattering, or a scolding tit in the 
garden. 

Presently a smell of dinner comes through 
from the kitchen, and while it cooks, N. 
comes in with the hot water and helps me 
to wash. All the afternoon I sleep or doze. 
At four-thirty I get up, by a little careful 
arrangement get into my wheeled chair, and 



A LAST DIARY 85 

am taken to the fireside. My legs having 
shot out in a tetanus meanwhile, they have 
to be bent up before I can climb into my 
armchair. As soon as I have tricked 
myself into the chair they shoot out again, 
and have to be bent up, and feet placed on 
the hot bottle. 

Then tea ! N. sits opposite — a short, fat 
little woman, who always on all occasions 
wears large black boots, which she says are 
necessary on account of her varicose veins. 
Her white apron above the waist is decorated 
with an embroidered design — a large red " O " 
with green leaves around it. She always 
eats with her mouth open, otherwise, I 
suspect, she has discovered the noise of her 
mastication drowns every other sound. 

After tea I read Gogol. After supper, 
Gogol. Then, my eyes aching, I stop and 
gaze into the fire. Nanny reads me a lot of 
funny stories out of Answers. I listen with 
a set smile, still gazing into the fire. I do 
not mind in the least, for to me it is all a 
mock show. Then came a biographical 



86 A LAST DIARY 

study of Charlie Chaplin — his early struggles, 
his present tastes and habits, what his 
Japanese chauffeur said of him (in the pidgin 
English of a Chinaman), his favourite holiday 
retreat, how he reads voraciously and always 
carries with him when he travels a trunk full 
of books (ah ! my God, it did not give their 
titles !), etc. There was a ridiculous likeness 
in all this to a " critique " of, say, George 
Moore in the Bookman. It aroused my 
slumbering brain. It interested me. (N. was 
absorbed.) This flashlight into a strange 
new world where the life, thoughts, habits 
of Mr. Chaplin were of transcendent interest 
recalled me to reality. I had been floating 
in a luxury of dream. Now I flouted Circe, 
and struggled back into full possession of 
my personality. I was tickled, amused, 
amazed. 

Then N. read me a series of informative 
snippets : how to make your lamp burn 
brighter (by putting a spoonful of sugar 
in the oil-well) ; how black beetles were not 
really beetles at all ; how Alfred Noyes was 



A LAST DIARY 87 

a great poet ; what a red bargee meant ; 
what a Blue Peter signified. 

At this my gorge rose at last. In the 
tones of a pufF-breasted pedagogue addressing 
a small boy, I said : " Oh, don't you know 
the famous line of R. L. S. about climbing 
into a sea-going ship when the Blue Peter 
is floating aloft ?" 

Now this was a contemptible piece of 
pride, for I only wanted to demonstrate to 
this scabby old bean that I knew all about 
a Blue Peter, and it was like her cheek to 
suppose I didn't. I experience the same 
irritation when she explains to me how to 
go from Paddington to Victoria, or where 
the British Museum is. Of a truth I 
am no dream figure then. The veritable 
W. N. P. B. shows his bristling pelage from 
every opening in the wires of the cage. 

How petty ! Intellectual pride has been 
the bane of my life. Yet I must be fair to 
myself. Who, 1 should like to know, has 
received greater incentive to this vice ? Have 
not inferior types all my life choked me, 



88 A LAST DIARY 

bound me, romped over me ? But what a 
beautifully geometrical Nemesis it all is 1 
Here I am in the last scene of the last act, 
the ruthless, arrogant intellectual, spending 
the last days of his ruined life alone, in the 
close companionship of an uneducated village 
woman who reads Answers. 

February Hth, 1919.-100,000 copies of 
Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal were sold in 
America alone. If 100,000 copies of my 
book are sold, that will mean £5,000 for E. 
Then I have a second volume for posthu- 
mous publication, the remainder of my diary 
from March, 1918, to the end, under the 
sensational and catchpenny title of The 
Diary of a Dying Man, beginning with Sir 
Thomas Browne's " We are in the power of 
no calamity while Death is in our own," and 
finishing up with Hamlet's last worst words : 
" The rest is silence." Another £5, 000, eh ? 
and E. a rich woman ? Time will show. 



A LAST DIARY 89 

The Icons 

Every man has his own icon. Secreted 
in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, 
the image of himself, concealed from view 
with elaborate care, treated invariably with 
great respect by means of which the Ego, 
being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to 
the rest of mankind, measures itself there- 
with, and in accordance with which it acts 
and moves and subsists. In the self- 
righteous man's bosom, it is a molten 
image of a little potentate who can do no 
wrong. In the egoist's, an idol loved and 
worshipped by almost all men, addressed 
with solemnity and reverence, and cast in 
an immutable brazen form. Only the truth - 
seeker preserves his image in clay-covered, 
damp rags — a working hypothesis. 

A man towards his icon is like the tender- 
ness and secretiveness of a little bird towards 
its nest, which does not know you have 
discovered its heart's treasure. For every- 
one knows the lineaments of your image 



90 A LAST DIARY 

and talks about them to everyone else save 
you, and no one dare refer to his own — it is 
bad form — so that in spite of the gossip and 
criticism that swirl around each one's per- 
sonality, a man remains sound-tight and 
insulated. 

The human comedy begins at the thought 
of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, 
of the treasured image to the real person — 
as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about 
a bust by Gaudier- Brzeska. 

Heavens ! what a toy-shop it will be at 
the Last Day, when all our little effigies 
are taken from their cupboards, unwrapped 
and ranged along beside us, shivering and 
nude. In that day how few will be able 
to say that they ever cried " God be 
merciful to me, a sinner," or " a fool," or 
" a humbug." 

The human tragedy begins as soon as one 
feels how often a man's life is ruined by 
simple reason of this disparity between the 
image and the real — the image (or the 
man's mistaken idea of himself) like an 



A LAST DIARY 91 

ignis fatuus leading him through devious 
paths into the morass of failure, or worse, of 
sheer laughiag-stock silliness. The moral 
is yvoiOi creavTov. 

(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your 
time of life 1) 

February lUh, 1919. — At 9 a.m. I heard 
the garden gate being forced open (it was 
frozen to the post) and the postman's 
welcome footsteps up the path. He dropped 
a parcel on the porch seat, knocked and 
went away again. I could not get at my 
parcel, though I was only a few feet away 
from it. So I lay and reflected what it 
might be. Surely not the book ordered at 
Bumpus's ? Too soon. H.'s promised 
cigarettes ? It sounded too heavy. My own 
book ? An early advance copy ? Perhaps. 

Nanny came in and settled it. It was 
the book from B.'s. I was so interested I 
let her go away without cutting the string. 
I struggled, but could not tear off the cover, 
and had to sit with the book on my lap, 
wondering. She came in to light the fire, 



92 A LAST DIARY 

and I asked for a knife. She picked the 
parcel up, took it to the kitchen, and brought 
the book back opened. I did not Hke this. 
I like opening my own parcels. 

It was James Joyce's Portrait of the 
Artist — a book which the mob will take 
fifty years to discover, but having once 
discovered it will again neglect. 

It was cold enough to freeze a brass 
monkey. I had had some diary to post up. 
The diary seemed to lose all interest and 
attraction. It was a sore temptation, but I 
decided to be a Stoic, and wrote till eleven- 
thirty, though my hands were blue and my 
nose ran. 

Then I read Joyce. An amazing book. 
Just the book I intended to write — had 
started it, in fact, when the crash came. 
He gives the flow of the boy's consciousness 
— rather the trickle of one thing after 
another — almost as well as Bashkirtseff. I 
have never read anything so extraordinary 
as the latter's pages wherein she plumbs to 
the bottom and the dregs of current con- 



A LAST DIARY 93 

sciousness. Her brain runs synchronously 
with her pen. She eviscerates her current 
thoughts and records them exactly with a 
current pen. 

It is difficult to do. I've tried it in this 
Journal and failed. I am trying it now, but 
it's not coming very easily. What I like is 
Joyce's candour and verisimilitude. I have 
tried that, but it's no good. The publishers 
rejected two splendid entries about prosti- 
tutes and other stuff. That is why I think, in 
truth, 100,000 copies will not be sold. My 
diary is too unpleasant for popularity. It is 
my passion for taking folk by the nose and 
giving them a wigging, my fierce contempt 
for every kind of complacency, Stephen 
Daedalus. Butler started the fashion with 
Edward Pontifex. Then there is Wells' 
George Ponder evo. Pontifex is a good name. 

On the wall in front of me is a pattern 
of ivy-leaves. In odd moments of list- 
lessness I am always counting them : 
there are 30 perpendicular rows with 47 
leaves in each row — that's 1,410 leaves in 



94 A LAST DIARY 

all. You'd never think there were so many, 
to look at the wall. I know to nausea that 
there are 40 little panes of glass in the 
window on my left — really only 39, as one 
is broken and stopped with cardboard. 
There are 7 bars (5 thin and 2 thick) in the 
back of the wooden chair. There were 
17 degrees of frost this morning, and I have 
to stop constantly to wipe my nose and 
warm my hands on a water-bottle. There 
is also a water-bottle at my feet. Klim — 
that is MILK backwards — printed on a wooden 
box I use as a book-rest and now lying 
upside down. Yliad Swen — this is the 
Daily News backwards. I am for ever 
w% reading it backwards as it 

lies about on my bed upside 
down. Then there are faces 
on the morris-patterned cur- 
tain and in the fire. 1 saw 

/ \ ^ ^^^^ -^^^^ ^^i^ 1^^^ night. It 

^^ was like me, but with a big 

hole excavated in the top of the skull, 

carrying red-hot coals and giving off a 




A LAST DIARY 95 

black smoke. The face was coal-black, too. 
I might have been some evil genie stoking 
the fires of hell. 

Heavens ! I wish I could discuss James 
Joyce with someone. I must write to R. 

"Dear old Lad, 

" Have you ever read James Joyce ? 
Literatui'e, my boy ; the most vivid book, 
living, obviously autobiographical, candid, 
such realism, beauty of style. Am so pleased 
I have found him out ! 1 am quite exultant. 
He is one of us !" 

Our sukie is an old copper one, and sings 
sometimes in splendid imitation of an 
orchestra tuning up. I can hear very 
clearly the oboes and violins. It makes me 
thirsty. 

JNIy hand has gone too cold and stiff to 
write more. 



96 A LAST DIARY 

My Canary 

The jacket is put over his cage at night- 
fall, and all night he roosts on a table close 
to my bed. When I wake in the silence of 
the night, it is difficult to believe that close 
to me there is a little heart incessantly 
pumping hot red blood. I have a sense of 
companionship at the thought. For I, too, 
silent, concealed in my bed, possess a heart 
pumping incessantly, though not so fast. 
I, too, am an animal, little bird, and we 
must both die. 

A Gasconade 

I owe neither a knee nor a bare gramercy 
to any man. All that I did, I did by my 
own initiative. To this sweeping assertion 
I make one exception — R., if for no other 
reason than that he taught me to love 
music. 

February ISth, 1919. — I had a letter 
from H. G. Wells this morning. He says : 



A LAST DIARY 97 

" You will have seen my Preface by this 
time." (I haven't.) " Prefaces always devas- 
tate relationships. But I hope you didn't 
think it too horrible. I had to play up to 
your standard of frankness." I knew he 
would be rude. But I'm afire to see what 
he says. 

I am going to be quite fond of this old 
Nanny. She is always cheerful and ready 
to do any mortal thing for me. Across the 
frightful abyss that separates our two several 
existences I throw this thin line of attach- 
ment and appreciation. 

The difference between a highly de- 
veloped human — say, like Meredith — and his 
housemaid is greater than the difference 
between the highest ape and the house- 
maid. 

February 16tk, 1919. — The publishers this 
morning sent me a proof of Mr. Wells' 
Introduction. It is excellent, and not rude 
at all. I devoured it with avidity — can't 
you see me ? The book won't be ready till 
about the end of March. 



98 A LAST DIARY 

The Bankruptcy of Imagination 

Mr. Lloyd George, at the Peace Confer- 
ence, said that he was persuaded to the 
League of Nations idea when recently he 
saw in France the innumerable graves of 
the fallen covering acres. 

Perpend. The statement is worth con- 
sidering. Note that it is at the end of the 
war he is speaking, that it is the number of 
graves he is moved by, and that what moves 
him to realise the horrors of war is the 
graves of dead men. What was Mr. Lloyd 
George's imagination doing before he went 
to France and saw the graves ? Would it 
help on the League, think you, if someone 
took his child by the hand and showed him 
all the acres of all the graves in Europe ; or 
all the mutilated in the hospitals when their 
wounds are being dressed ; or all the asylums 
when the madmen are having their morning 
rave ; or all the St. Dunstan's in the world ; 
or all the dying and dead babies ? 

The war has beggared the imagination. 



A LAST DIARY 99 

If a woman loses five sons, she is not smitten 
five times as much as if she lost only one. 
All suffering has limits beyond which the 
heart is insensible. We are no more appalled 
at the death of ten million men than at that 
of ten thousand, or, indeed, if it be under 
our eyes, ten or one. It is a fact that we 
are forgetting the war already — those who 
weren't in it. Skating, dancing, political 
squabbles are all the go — pigs over their 
pannage. If a woman has lost a son, com- 
pensations are manifold — e.g., some gewgaw 
from the King's hands at Buckingham Palace. 
What the son thought or suffered no one 
knows, because he's dead. If he survives 
he wants to remain dumb, or lacks capacity 
to express his thought about the hell and 
damnation of war. If he had such a capacity, 
lis hearers would lack the imaginative sym- 
pathy to be scalded by his boiling ink. 

In this week's Times Literary Supplement 

s a cringing review of a rotten book. 

Notebooks of a Spinster Lady — obviously 

1 1 nob — say, an earl's daughter. True, the 



100 A LAST DIARY 

reviewer deferentially refers to some of the 
stories as o/of, but hastens to explain that all 
he means is 0/6? to him. In the same issue 
is another snobbish review on the life of 
Meredith, excellent according to other 
reviewers. It is headed " Small Talk about 
George Meredith " — from which one knows 
what to expect. The reviewer knew Mere- 
dith personally, and explains with delightful 
naivete that the reason why Meredith 
would not go to see his first wife on her 
death-bed, though she asked him to come, 
was his sensitive horror of death-bed scenes. 
As for Meredith being ashamed of being a 
tailor's son, the idea is scouted. Yet, he 
was, and I hate him for it. 

February 17th, 1919.— Reading the Intro- 
duction was like reading my own 
obituary notice. It rather moved me. 
All day yesterday I buzzed over it 
like a famished bee. Streaks of it at 
intervals would shoot through my mind. 
I weighed sentences, measured them, tested 
them. I was curious over " a certain 



A LAST DIARY 101 

thread of unpremeditated and exquisite 
beauty that runs through the story this 
diary tells." Lord in heaven, what is it ? 

Mr. Wells is sympathetic and almost too 
generous. Characteristically he concentrates 
on me as a biologist, whereas I like to look 
at myself posthumously as a writer. 

He is a good fellow, and I am most 
grateful and most pleased. 

It's milder to-day, and the chaffinches are 
sweetly singing outside my window. 

Nurse said to me after breakfast : 

*' Well, what are you going to do ?" 

I replied apologetically : 

" Oh, writing, I suppose." 

*' This everlasting writing." She shrugged 
her shoulders, and I felt it was most un- 
sociable in me not to satisfy her curiosity. 

Legs 

February \5th, 1919.— B.— (to Nurse 
stepping on his toes) — Seemingly either 
my feet or yours are very large. 

N. — Oh, but you see it's my legs are so 



102 A LAST DIARY 

short. 1 can't step across easily. It will 
be all right if you go to Eastbourne. 
Nurse has long legs. 

B. — But what's the use of her long legs if 
she can't get a house ? 

N. — Aunt Hobart's legs were so bent up 
that though she was six feet long, her coffin 
was only four feet. 

B. — Why were Aunt Hobart's legs bent 
up? 

N. — Rheumatism. She was buried at the 
same time as her grand-daughter. 

B. — But her legs were not bent up ? 

N. — Oh, no. Bessie was only sixteen, and 
died of scarlet fever. 

The Water Ousel's Song 
A Memory. 
I leaned over the parapet of an old stone 
bridge covered with great, old, branching, 
woody tangles of ivy, and leading from an 
oak wood across a stream into a meadow. 
I leaned over the parapet, and gazed long at 
the rushing water below. " I will look," 



A LAST DIARY 103 

I said, " as if I am never going to see this 
picture again." And so I looked, and now I 
am glad I looked like that, for the memory 
of the picture in every detail comes back, and 
indeed has never left me. 

Along each bank margin grew a row of 
alders, and in the bed of the river were 
scattered great slabs of rock jutting out of 
the water, and spotted white with the 
droppings of water ousels and kingfishers 
that loved to pause on them. A great 
body of swift, strong and silent water came 
sweeping down to the falls, then dropping 
over in a solid green bar into a cauldron of 
roaring, hissing liquid below, churning the 
surface waters into soapy foam of purest 
white — the white of the summer cloud and 
the water ousel's breast. Outside the 
foam- belt the water of this salmon pool 
ripples away gently in oily eddies and circles. 
After the rough passage over the falls, 
some of the water rests awhile in little 
recesses on the periphery of the pool. But 
gradually it works round into the current 



104 A LAST DIARY 

which, like the wake of a steamer, cuts 
diametrically across the pool, and swishes 
everything — leaves, twigs, dead insects — on 
to the hurtling shallows. " Watch how the 
vault of water first bends unbroken in pure 
polished velocity over the arching rocks at 
the brow of the cataract covering them with 
a dome of crystal, twenty feet thick, so 
swift that its motion is unseen, except when 
a foam globe from above darts over it like a 
fallen star." 

This is from Ruskin's description of the 
Falls of SchaiFhausen. But note that it is 
equally applicable to my little falls — if we 
banish the phantom Size. 

It may be only sour grapes for my part, 
but— 

" Why go gallivanting 
With the nations round ? 
Leave to Robert Browning 
Beggars, fleas, and vines — 
Leave to mournful Ruskin 
Popish Apennines. 
Where's the mighty credit 
In admiring Alps ? 
Any goose sees glory 
In their snowy scalps." 



A LAST DIARY 105 

A water ousel alighted on a boulder and 
bowed to me. He and his little white shirt- 
front, continually bobbing, were like a con- 
cert-room artist acknowledging the plaudits 
of an enthusiastic audience. 1 was pleased 
with him, but his excess of ecstasy at sight 
of me made my own pleasure seem dull and 
lethargic. 

Then he hopped a little higher on to the 
stump of an alder, and being twilight now, 
and the day's food hunt over, he poured 
out his quivering soul in an ecstasy of song. 
Like a solo violin with orchestra accompani- 
ment, it blended in harmony with the 
voluminous sound of the water, now rising 
above it, now overwhelmed by it. Then, as 
if suddenly shy and nervous of his self- 
revelation, the little bird gave one or two 
short bobs, and flew swiftly away upstream. 
Such spiritual ecstasy made me feel very 
poor indeed in soul, and I went home with 
a sense of humiliation. 

February 20th, 1919. — My beloved wife 
spent the night here, then returned to 



106 A LAST DIARY 

Brighton. " Do you feel my heart on my 
lips?" "Dear, I love you," and her tears 
trickled on to my beard. 

Two poor grief-stricken things. She 
shook with the anguish of the moment, 
withdrew, and again flung herself on my 
breast. I sat motionless in my chair. Ah 1 
my God ! how I longed to be able to stand 
and pick up, press to me, and hide away in 
the shelter of strong arms that sweet, dear, 
fluttering spirit. It is cruel — cruel to her 
and cruel to me. I thought my heart must 
break. There comes a time when evil cir- 
cumstances squeeze you out of this world. 
There is no longer any room. Oh I Why 
did she marry me ? They ought not to 
have let her do it. 

February ^Ast, 1919. — I sometimes fancy 
I am not weaned from life even now. Pic- 
tures in the paper make me agonise. Oh> 
for a little happiness for her and me together, 
jurt a short respite. What agony it is to 
have a darling woman fling herself into your 
arms, press you to her dear bosom and ask 



A LAST DIARY 107 

you desperately to try to get well, when you 
know it is hopeless. She knows it is hopeless, 
yet every now and then. . . . She pictures me 
in a study in her flat (all her own), walking 
on two sticks. And already the tendons of 
my right leg are drawing in permanently. 

I am not weaned because my curiosity is 
not dead. When I think of dying, I am 
tantalised to know all that will happen after. 
I want to be at my funeral, and see who's 
there and if they are very sorry, who sheds a 
friendly tear, what sort of service, etc. Oh 1 
I wish I were dead and forgotten. 

February 2'2nd, 1919.— Mr. Wells, in his 
Preface, refers to my watching bats in a 
cave (they were deserted manganese mine 
borings) and the evening flights of starlings, 
which were described in separate articles I 
sent him. Herewith is my adventure among 
the bats. A first-class field naturalist who 
has made some remarkable studies in the 
habits of that elusive and little known 
animal the mole, said to me at the conclusion 
of his investigations : " Yes, I have lived two 



108 A LAST DIARY 

years with the mole, and have arrived only 
on the fringe of the subject." He was a 
melancholy fellow and too absorbed in his 
studies even to shave his face of a morning. 
I arrived only on the outside of the fringe 
in my study of the habits of the Greater 
Horseshoe Bat, but I got a lot of enjoyment 
out of the risky adventure of exploring the 
disused mines. The wooden struts were 
rotten, and the walls and roofs of the galleries 
had fallen in here and there. So we had 
sometimes to crawl on hands and knees to 
get past. All the borings were covered with 
a red slime, so we wore engineers' overalls, 
which by the time we had finished changed 
from blue to red, speckled with grease drop- 
ping from our candles. Occasionally, in 
turning a corner, a sudden draught would 
blow the candles out, and in one rather lofty 
boring we were stopped by deep water, and, 
boy-like, meditated the necessity of removing 
clothes and swimming on with candles 
fastened on our foreheads. One boring 
opened into the side of a hill by a small, 



A LAST DIARY 109 

insignificant, and almost invisible hole at the 
bottom of a steep slide. We slid down with 
a rope, and once inside the little hole at the 
bottom, found a big passage with a narrow- 
gauge line and abandoned truck — great 
excitement ! Another entrance to the mines 
was by way of a shaft no bigger than an 
ordinary man-hole in a drain pipe, its mouth 
being overgrown with brambles. We fixed 
a rope round the trunk of a tree, and went 
down, hand over hand. We crawled along 
a narrow passage — three of us, leaving no 
one at the top to guard the rope — and at 
intervals espied our game, hanging to the 
roof by the hind legs. We boxed three 
altogether, gently unfixing the hind legs, 
and laying the little creatures in a tin care- 
fully lined with wool. The Horseshoe Bat is 
the strangest sight in the world to come 
upon in a dark cave hanging upside down 
from the roof like an enormous chrysalis in 
shape. For when roosting, this bat puts its 
two thin hind legs and feet very close to- 
gether, making a single delicate pedicle, and 



no A LAST DIARY 

wraps its body entirely in its wings, head 
and ears included. When disturbed, it 
gently draws itself up a little by bending its 
legs. When thoroughly awakened, it un- 
folds its wings and becomes a picture of 
trembling animation : the head is raised, and 
it looks at you nervously with its little beady 
dark, glittering eyes, the large ears all the 
while vibrating as swiftly as a tuning-fork. 
These with the grotesque and mysterious 
leaf-like growth around its nose — not to 
mention the centrepiece that stands out 
like a door-knocker — make a remarkable 
vision by candle-light in a dark cave. 

February 237'd, 1919. — Despite the un- 
fathomable ennui and creeping slowness 
of the hours in the living through of each 
day, the days of the past month or two, by 
reason of their dull sameness, seem, when 
viewed in retrospect, like the telegraph poles 
on a railway journey. And always rolling 
through my head is the accompaniment 
of some tune — Shepherd Fennel's Dance, 
Funeral Marches. 



A LAST DIARY 111 

I want to hear Berlioz's Requiem. Poor 
Berlioz ! How I sympathise with you. 

February 25th, 1919. — Am feeling rather 
queer these last few days, and am full of 
forebodings. Dear E.'s struggles harrow 
me, and worst of all, I anticipated this as 
from December, 1915. When I showed 
my terrible gloom then, one person laughed 
gaily. Too much imagination — the ability 
to foresee in detail and preconstruct — is a 
curse. For I have lived through all this 
time before ; yet the actual loses none of its 
poignancy. 

February 26th, 1919. — The doctor came 
to-day and recommended petroleum. All 
right. He is a decent sort and knows his 
business. Am feeling muzzy. Moras non 
numero nisi serenas. This should make us 
nineteen-nineteeners smile ! 

February 27th, 1919. — A little easier in 

mind. Posted proofs of my Journal to R. 

Am much perturbed. Will he shrink from 

me, or merely tolerate me as a poor wretched 

I manikin? I fear it will not bring me 



112 A LAST DIARY 

any increase of affection from anyone, and 

some 

A load of sadness settled on me this after- 
noon. As I lay resting down in bed, for no 
reason I can discover, the memory of the 
evening prayers my mother taught me 
flashed over my mind, and because steeped 
in memory seemed very beautiful. Here 
they are : 

" Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, 
Look upon a little child, 
Pity my simplicity. 
Suffer me to come to Thee." 

Then the Lord's Prayer. Then : 

" Keep us faithful, keep us pure, 
Keep us ever more Thine own. 
Help, O help us to endure. 
Fit us for the promised ci'own." 

Then I hopped into bed and was asleep 
in a moment. 

I went on mechanically saying these 
prayers when I was grown to a big boy, 
and subconsciously felt that the first verses 
were quite unsuitable. But I never had, 
like some, an instinct for prayer. I don't 



A LAST DIARY 113 

suppose I ever prayed, only raced through 
some rhymed requests learnt by rote ! 

I can remember very clearly the topog- 
raphy these addresses to the Almighty 
assumed in my brain. Thus : 




^ W ni c 



A. I began here in a horizontal direction 
with " Gentle Jesus," the successive verses 
being so many hurdles to leap over. Then 
I turned abruptly to the left and ran 
up a tall, narrow, squiggly piece like a 
pagoda — the Paternoster (B) finishing off 
with the tail-piece (C), the single verse of 
4 lines. 

I never had till recently any religious 
sense at all. I was a little sceptic before I 
inew it. With no one to direct me, I had 
I nose for agnostic literature, and when I 
bund Haeckel and Hume I whooped with 



114 A LAST DIARY 

satisfaction. " I thought so/' I said to my- 
self. 

"Beautiful," did I say? Why, no. 
Sottish doggerel. The pathos of an inno- 
cent child repeating it ! 

February 2Uh, 1919.— I thirst, I thirst 
for a little music — to replenish my jaded 
spirit. It is difficult to keep one's soul alive 
in such an atmosphere. 

Analysis of the "Journal of a 

Disappointed Man " 
March lOtk, 1919. 

1. Ambition. 

2. Reflections on Death. 

3. Intellectual Curiosity. j 

4. Self Consciousness. 1 

5. Self Introspection. ! 

6. Zest of Living. 

I wonder if any reviewer will bring out I 
these points : ' 

7. Humour. 

8. Shamelessness. 

My confessions are shameless. I confess, 
but do not repent. The fact is, my con-! 



A LAST DIARY 115 

fessions are prompted, not by ethical 
motives, but intellectual. The confessions 
are to me the interesting records of a self- 
investigator. 

If I live to read the review notices, I 
shall probably criticise them. I shall be 
criticising the criticisms of my life, putting 
the reviewers right, a long lean hand 
stretching out at them from the tomb. I 
shall play the part of boomerang, and " cop " 
them one unexpectedly. There will be a 
newspaper discussion : Is Barbellion dead ? 
And I shall answer by a letter to the 
Editor : 

" Dear Sir, 

" Yes, 1 am dead. I killed myself 
off at the end of my book, because it was 
high time. Your reviewer is incorrect in 
saying I died of creeping paralysis. It 
was of another kindred but different 
disease. 

"P.S. — It may interest your readers to 
know that I am not yet buried." 



116 A LAST DIARY 

Or, 

" Dear Sir, 

" There is an inaccuracy in your 
reviewer's statement. I was not in the 
Secret Service. It should have been the 
Civil Service, of which I was a member up 
to within eighteen months of my decease." 

Or, 

'* Dear Sir, 

" I should be glad if you would 
correct the impression generated by one of 
your correspondents that Bai^bellioJi is the 
name of an evil spirit appearing on Wal- 
purgis night. As a matter of fact, my 
forbears were simple folk — tallow chandlers 
in B " 

March 12th, 1919. 

" Out of the day and night 
A joy has taken flight. 
Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar 
Fill my faint heart with grief, but with delight 
No more, O nevermore." 



A LAST DIARY 117 

These sobbing words bring a catch in my 
breath and tears to my eyes. Dear Shelley, 
I, too, have suffered. 

" No more, O nevermore ! 
No more, O nevermore !" 

March 15th, 1919.— The first peep of the 
chick : among the pubhshers' announcements 
in The Times: " The Journal of a Dis- 
appointed 3Ian, a genuine confession of 
thwarted ambition and disillusionment." 

Am reading another of James Joyce's — 

Ulysses — running serially in that exotic 

periodical. The Little Review, which 

announces on its cover that it makes " no 

compromise with the public taste." Ulysses 

is an interesting development. Damn ! it's 

all my idea, the technique I projected. 

I According to the reviews, Dorothy Richard- 

jon's Tunnel is a novel in the same manner 

—intensive, netting in words the continuous 

low of consciousness and semi-consciousness. 

3f course the novelists are behind the 

laturalists in the recording of minutiae : 



118 A LAST DIARY 

Edmund Selous and Julian Huxley and 
others have set down the life of some species 
of bird in exhaustive detail — every flip of 
the tail, every peck preceding the grand 
drama of courtship and mating. But this 
queer comparison lies between these natu- 
ralists and novelists like William de Morgan 
rather than Joyce. 

March 16th, 1919. — I am getting rapidly 
worse. One misery adds itself to another 
as I explore the course of this hideous 
disease. 

March 17th, 1919.— Here is Hector 
Berlioz in his amazing Memoirs writing to 
a friend for forgiveness for causing him 
anxiety : " But you know how my life fluc- 
tuates. One day, calm, dreary, rhythmical ; 
the next, bored, nerve-torn, snappy and 
surly as a mangy dog ; vicious as a 
thousand devils, sick of life and ready to end| 
it, were it not for the frenzied happiness thatj 
draws ever nearer, for the odd destiny that II 
feel is mine ; for my staunch friends ; for! 
music, and lastly for curiosity. My life is 



A LAST DIARY 119 

a story that interests me greatly." This 
verftuchte curiosity ! I could botanise over 
my own grave, attentively examine the 
maggots out of my own brain. 

March 18th, 1919.— Mother (she liked me 
to call her Moth. Hubbard, Lepidopterous 
Hubbard, and she used to sign her letters 
Hubbard) had a pretty custom, which she 
hated anyone to detect, of putting every 
letter she wrote to us when stamped, 
directed and sealed, into her Bible for a 
minute or two, ostensibly to sanctify the 
sealing up. 

Memories like these lurk in corners of my 
dismantled brain like cobwebs. I fetch 
them down with a pen for a mop. 

I've had such a dear and beautiful letter 
from H. this morning. 

March 19th, 1919. 

" While all alone 
Watching the loophole's spark 
Lie I, with life all dark^ 
Feet tethered, hands fettered 
Fast to the stone. 
The grim walls, square lettered 



120 A LAST DIARY 

With prisoned men's groan, 
Still strain the banner poles, 
Through the wind's song ; 
Westward the banner rolls 
Over my wrong." 

For all C.O.'s and paralytics (selected 
by E.). 

March 20fh, 1919.— A letter from H. G. 
Wells. My book, he says, interested him 
personally as he once " tried hard " to get 
into the B.M. (in Flower's time), but failed. 
" I don't think I should have found it very 
suitable." No I He would have promptly 
finished on the gallows for murdering the 
keeper. 

March 21st, 1919. — Another cobweb : an 
illustrated book of miscellanies called The 
Woidd of Wonders in our ancient bookcase 
at home alongside Eliza Cook's poems, 
Howutt's Visits to Remarkable Places, an im- 
mense green volume of Hogarth's drawings, 
a Dictionary of Dates, Roget's Thesaurus, 
etc. I remember distinctly the pictures of 
the Man in the Iron Mask, freak tubers, and 



A LAST DIARY 121 

carrots like human heads in a row across a 
page, snow crystals, Indian jugglers, two 
Amazons of heroic girth carrying swords, 
striding along sands ; the swords were 
curved, and one lady was much stouter than 
the other. I used to stare at these pictures 
before I could read, and invented my own 
legends. I always thought the potatoes 
and carrots were a species of savage, and 
many pictures I can recall, but do not know 
what they represent even now. 

March ^Qth, 1919. — Time lures me for- 
ward. But I've dug my heels in awaiting 
those two old tortoises, Chatto and Windus. 

March 27th, 1919.— I've won! This 
morning at 9 a.m. the book arrived. 
C. and W. thoughtfully left the pages to 
be cut, so I've been enjoying the exquisite 
pleasure of cutting the pages of my own 
book. And nothing's happened. No earth- 
quake, no thunder and hghtning, no omen 
in a black sky. In fact, the sun is shining. 
Publication next week. 

March 2Hth, 1919. — Having stabbed my 



122 A LAST DIARY 

arm and signed the contract, now when the 
clock strikes, I'd Hke to stay : 

'^O lente, lente, currite noctis equi ! 
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, 
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned." 

But I asked for it, have got it — and to the 
full — and must fulfil my undertaking. My 
feelings see-saw. To-day I want to live in 
Hell's despite. The day before yesterday I 
had my back to the wall in a feat of sheer 
endurance. 

Maixh 30th, 1919. — Now that I have 
spurred my hippogrifF to the journey's end, 
now that I have wreaked my will on that 
very obtuse gentleman, my Lord Destiny, 
who failed to take due measure of his man, 
now as soon as I have freed myself from the 
hard cocoon of my environment, and can 
sweeten and soothe my warped frame with 
a little of the delicious honey of kindly 
recognition, I can rest in the sun a while, 
soak up the warmth and sweetness into this 
tortured spirit and crave everyone's pardon 
before the end comes. For I know that the 



A LAST DIARY 123 

Journal will mean horror to some. I realise 
that a strong-minded man would by instinct 
keep his sufferings to himself — the English- 
man above all — (but I doubt if I am an 
Englishman really. My true home I guess 
is further east). I have been recklessly 
self-willed and inconsiderate, and I have no 
sort of excuse except the most unprecedented 
provocation. 1 have been in the grip of 
more than one strong passion, and my moral 
strength has been insufficient to struggle 
with them and throw them off. I have 
been overcome, and the publication of 
my Journal is really the signal of my 
defeat. 

Ah, but it takes a terrific lot of energy 
to set about putting one's moral house in 
order ! It is too late, and I am too weakened. 
You must take me as I am and remember 
that with a longer life, just as I might have 
done better things intellectually, so also 
morally. Give me your love if you can. I 
love you all, and because I love you comfort 
my self-despondency with the thought that 



124 A LAST DIARY 

there must be some grain of goodness in me 
overlaid. 

jipriL 1st, 1919. — I love my hair to be 
combed — it makes one realise what an 
avenue for self-expression was closed when 
man lost his tail. I bitterly regret the loss 
of my tail ; 1 love the benison of hot water 
for my urticating hands ; the tick-tack of 
our cottage clock ; a cigarette — many cigar- 
ettes ; letters — these are all my pleasures ; 
pills, the air-cushion, hot bottle, a cramped 
leg straightened — these are my reliefs ; sleep 
— this my refuge. 



R. AND I AT THE B.M. 

Ap?il 5t/i. 1919. — What friends we 
were ! The mutual sympathy between 
us was complete, so that our intercom- 
munication was telegraphic in its brevity, 
frequently telepathic and wordless, yet all- 
sufficing. He had an extraordinary faculty 
for apt quotations : he loved Admiral 
Buzza, Mr. Middleton, and similar cronies. 



A LAST DIARY 125 

Shakespeare was a never- failing reservoir. 
Together we passed along the street to our 
rendezvous, coats flapping, hands waving, 
tongues wagging, two slim youths, bespec- 
tacled, shoulders bent, bright- eyed. 

We used to lunch at Gloucester Road, 
sometimes in Soho, and in the summer in 
Kensington Gardens. Our luncheon talks 
were wild and flippant. It was in the even- 
ings after dinner at his rooms or at mine 
that we conversed seriously far into the 
stilly night, serious and earnest as only 
youth can be. During the course of a year 
our discussions must have several times 
passed in stellar transit through the whole 
zodiac of intellectual, moral, and social arcs, 
God! how we talked! I took charge of 
metaphysics and literature ; R. of art and 
sociology. 

His room and mine at the British Museum 
were near one another on opposite sides of 
the same corridor, and one of my vivid 
memories of those days is R. coming in the 
course of the morning, gently opening my 



126 A LAST DIARY 

door, stealing in and advancing slowly up 
towards my table on tip-toe, eyebrows raised 
as far as he could possibly get them right up 
under his scalp, arms down straight at the 
sides, hands raised at the wrists and perform- 
ing continuous circular movements outwards 
while he softly whistled some beautiful 
melody we'd heard the night before. I 
would drop my dissections, turn and ask 

" How does that piece go that starts ?" 

(T whistled a fragment.) 

At lunch-time, whoever was first ready 
would visit the other's room, and should the 
occupant's head be still bent over his work, 
the same kind of remark was regularly made : 
" Come, come ! I don't like to see this 
absorption in the trivial round. Remember 
the man with the muckrake. The sun 
shines : be heliotropic. Let gallows gape 
for dog, let man go free." 

Our intimacy nettled some of our col- 
leagues. " What are you two conspirators 
up to?" (R. in a black billycock, and I in a 
brown one, were tete-a-tete in the corridor.) 



A LAST DIARY 127 

"Discussing the modern drama" (said to 
annoy, of course). 

" Damon and Pythias," sneered one, and 
we laughed aloud. 

We carried our youth like a flag through 
those dusty galleries, and our warm friend- 
ship was a ringing challenge to all those 
frosty pows. 

April 8tk, 1919. — Went out yesterday for 
the first time for nearly five months. A 
beautiful April day, warm, a full bird chorus, 
the smell of violets, of wood- smoke — and the 
war was over. I felt I could as an honour- 
able human being look a Long-tailed Tit in 
the feathers now and not blench. The sky 
was above me — scores of white eyots floating 
in the sea of blue — and my heart fluttered a 
little, and for a moment my blood ran wine, 
until the inevitable reflection settled like a 
blight. I should have preferred not to be 
reminded, but the realisation how beautiful 
the world is swept over me all unready in a 
mighty flood. " Women are pretty things 
really," said E. as she looked at photos in a 



I 



128 A LAST DIARY 

picture paper : it was reborn in her mind in 
a flash of dehght. 

April 10th, 1919. — A quiet day with my 
heartf nil of loving-kindness for all. Given 
time, I could change myself into something 
better. You may not believe it, but even in 
my worst days 1 once had a big desire for 
self-sacrifice. I was thrilled to find that I 
was making someone happy by my love and 
deeply longed to surrender all for love. 

An Enigma 

April 11th, 1919. — In 1915 I received a 
p.c. which has puzzled me ever since. It is 
an enigma to me as baffling as a piece of 
Coptic text. It was in an uneducated hand 
asking for a museum pamphlet I had written 
on the louse, signed " T. Wood {Boggeria 
princeps)." Any suggestions ? 

Nurse and I have lived here alone for over 
a month, and she is kindness itself, cheerful, 
willing to fetch and bring, never impatient 
with me or irritable — a good soul. 



A LAST DIARY 129 



The Rabbits' Golgotha 

April lUh, 1919. — Those sand dunes 1 
Their characteristic feature was rabbits' 
skulls, rabbits' scapulae, ribs, pelvises, legs, 
bleached, white and dry ; rotting rabbits 
being mined and gradually buried by gaudy 
red-marked carrion beetles ; pieces of rabbits' 
fluff and fur ; rabbits' screams in the teeth of 
a stoat (a common sound) ; and the little 
round dry pellets of rabbits, more number- 
less than the snail shells. And lastly, rabbits 
— rabbits hopping, racing, slinking, dis- 
appearing down holes, always and every- 
where showing the intruder fleeting glimpses 
of the little white patches on the underside 
of the stumpy tail, the signal to disperse or 
dive into the sand. 

The dunes are always associated in my 
mind with burning hot, cloudless, summer 
lays, during the whole long course of which 
Arithout ceasing Lapwings flopped around my 
lead, uttering their crazy wails, circuses of 

9 



180 A LAST DIARY 

scimitar-winged Swifts swished by and 
screamed hysterically, the face of the blue 
sky was dotted at regular intervals with 
singing Larks, singing all day long without 
intermittence, poised menacingly overhead, 
so that the white-hot needle points of their 
song seemed likely at any moment to 
descend perpendicularly and penetrate the 
skull. Occasionally, a dazzlingly white 
Herring Gull would sail slowly, majestically 
in from the cliffs, and from a much greater 
height than all the rest of us, cry in a deep 
voice " ha-ha-ha," like some supreme being 
in sardonic amusement at the vulgar whirli- 
gig of life below him. I 
A still summer day, say you ? The air 
was charged with sound, had you the ears I 
to hear. It is not merely the birds' cries, it 
is their dangerous living, feverish and intense, 
that contributes to this uproar of life. The 
heart-muscles and wing-muscles give out a 
note as they contract (this is a physiological, 
fact). The interior of, say, a Falcon's body 
is a scene of dark -sounding romance andj 



A LAST DIARY 131 

incessant activity, with the blood racing 
through the vessels, and the glands secreting, 
and the muscles contracting. Just here at 
my feet is an avalanche, jagged boulders of 
silica are descending and spreading out in a 
fan-shaped talus — only sand grains, so I 
cannot hear the crash of the boulders, but 
matter — atomic solar systems — colossal ! 

And behind all, behind every sight and 
every other sound, is the sound of the great 
sea, the all-powerful creator of the dunes, 
who in a single evening (for a thousand ages 
are but an evening in his calculations) could 
sweep them away or sweep up another area 
of sand and marram grass as big. One 
church is already obliterated. That was 
yesterday. To-morrow, maybe, the village 
further inland will have vanished too. 

That is the secret of the fascination of the 
dunes. Superficially, all seems dead and 
dull. Reflection brings the deeper under- 
standing of myriad forms of life, creeping, 
running, springing, burrowing — of noisy, 
screaming, struggling life, dominated by 



ii 



132 A LAST DIARY 

the august, secular movements of the great 
sea. 

Sometimes, towards the end of the after- 
noon, I would grow tired, the brilliance 
would become garish. Then, leaving the 
thyme, the eyebright, the wild pansies, the 
viper's bugloss (in clusters), an occasional 
teazle, after boxing every sort of insect and 
every sort of plant that I had not collected 
before (the birds' eggs I had long ago swept 
into my cabinet), J would hurry out to the 
shore, take off my clothes, and be rebaptised 
in the sea. A hundred yards' run up the 
cool sands and back, and I was dry, and 
dallied awhile in the sand-hills before putting 
on my shirt that smelled of stale sweat. 

It was so good to divest myself of particu- 
larities that clung like the burrs on my 
stockings, and plunge into the universality 
of the sea I Subconsciously that was my 
motive and the cause of my delight. 

April IQth, 1919. — I am still miserable, 
especially on E.'s account, that dear brave 
woman. But I have undergone a change. 



A LAST DIARY 133 

My whole soul is sweetened by the love 
of those near and dear to me, and by the 
sympathy of those reading my book, 

Apiil 2\st, 1919. — Nurse was cutting my 
beard, and handed me the mirror to report 
progress. " The right moustache," I said 
critically, "seems to droop down a lot." 
She twisted up the left between finger and 
thumb, and then in a flash, before I had time 
to scream, damped her finger with her 
tongue, and gave a powerful screw to the 
right 1 

Beauty 

April 2'lnd, 1919.— Under the lens of 
scientific analysis, natural beauty disappears. 
The emotion of beauty and the spirit of 

I analysis and dissection cannot exist con- 
temporaneously. The sunset becomes waves 
of light impinging on atmospheric dust ; 
the most beautiful pearl, the encysted itch 
of a mollusc. 

And not natural beauty alone, but all 

I, beauty — all the furniture of earth, and all 



134 A LAST DIARY 

the choir of heaven at the intellect's beck 
must shed their beautiful vestments, although 
their aureoles in the interim shall remain 
safe in the keeping of man's soul. For just 
as man's scientific analysis destroys beauty, 
so his synthetic art creates it, and man 
creates beauty, Nature supplying the raw 
materials. 

Nature is the clay, man the potter. Every- 
one feeling the emotion of beauty becomes 
a creative artist. If the world were as ugly 
as sin, the artist would recreate it beautiful 
in the image of his own beautiful spirit, just 
as Frank Brangwyn and Joseph Pennell are 
actually now doing with those industrial 
hideousnesses. But man's generous nature, 
because there is beauty in his own heart, 
naively assumes its possession by others, and 
so projects it into Nature. But he sees in 
her only the truth and goodness that are in 
himself. Natural beauty is everyone's 
mirror. 

Similarly, as I believe, man creates the 
world itself after his own mind. Consult 



A LAST DIARY 135 

the humanists, in whose system of philosophy 
I have a profound intuitive belief. 

Certainly there are many times when 
Nature, by pure accident, having other aims 
than our delight, produces the finished 
article. Helen of Troy, I suppose, required 
no emendation from the artist's hand. Nor 
does the Watersmeet, Lynton. Occasionally 
a human drama completes itself perfectly in 
five acts, observing all the unities. 

It may be claimed by the moralists that 
there must be some very definite inherent 
direction in Nature's processes towards the 
light of beauty, if in the ordinary course of 
producing, say, a blue flower to attract 
insects, a thing of rare beauty at the same 
time emerges therefrom. But this is putting 
the cart before the horse. For man's own 
ideas of beauty are necessarily based on the 
forms and colour he finds in Nature, the 
only world he knows. So that we may say 
roughly that for our purposes we love blue 
flowers, for instance, because bees first loved 
them 1 The bees were the original artists 



186 A LAST DIARY 

who created and educated our taste — they 
and the blue sky above us, that is. As a 
fact it is impossible to imagine the physical 
world " as ugly as sin " — unless at the same 
time you imagine man's soul as being 
" as ugly as sin." You can imagine the world 
different — e.g., with fewer forms and colours, 
say uniformly flat and brown, a desert. 
But that would mean that, not only art 
would be poorer, but man himself as such 
would cease to exist. Instead we should 
have evolved as glorified sand. 

Art has to take its cue from Nature, 
though Nature, whatever its chance form in 
any sort of planet, would always be emended 
by Art provided man were the same, because 
Mind is above Matter, Art above Nature. 

Ap?il25th, 1919.— My beloved's birthday. 

April 26th, 1919. — Here is the nucleus of 
a sordid newspaper tragedy. I sleep on the 
ground floor in the front. Nurse sleeps at 
the back, upstairs She is very deaf and I 
am helpless. Her father and mother both 
died of heart failure. One sister has heart 



A LAST DIARY 137 

disease and another heart weakness. Her 
heart too is weak, and my electric bell won't 
ring. If it did, she can only hear it when 
awake. We live alone, and each morning 
1 endure suspense till I hear her coming 
down the stairs. 



Overheard in the World Outside 

In the road, e?i passant. 

A Patrician's Voice : I was staying at 
Lord Burnham's place over the week-end. 
Very jolly. 

Second Voice : I can never understand 
why he . . . (They passed.) 

Two countrymen meeting in the road. I 
cannot see them, but quite well know how 
they have drawn up like railway engines 
standing on their metals, one on the right 
side and the other on the left of the road, 
converse a moment across the intervening 
middle space : 

" How is it then ?" 

" Oh, pretty middling." 



138 A LAST DIARY 

" They aven't shot your dog yet then, I 
see " (rabies reported in the district). 

"I'll watch it." 

And they steam slowly onwards. 

April 28th, 1919. — Yes, there are com- 
pensations. Few can appreciate a sunny 
morning and a blackbird's contralto from 
the walnut-tree. 

The " happy and comfortable " like to 
hear about the compensations. They always 
thought things were never so bad as they 
seem. " You must pull your socks up 
and make the best of things." But you 
shouldn't have the impudence to tell him so. 

Last night, a blizzard, a gale ! 

Ap?il 29th, 1919. — Having cast my bread 
upon the waters, it amuses me to find it 
returning with the calculable exactitude of 
a tidal movement — e.g., in my Journal I 
stroked Public Opinion and it now purrs to 
the tune of two and half pages of review : 
the Saturday Review I cursed with bell, 
book, and candle and — voila ! they mangle 
me in their turn. 



A LAST DIARY 139 

For the most part the reviewers say what 
I have told them to say in the book. One 
writes that it is a remarkable book. I told 
him it was. Another says I am a conceited 
prig. I have said as much more than once. 
A third hints at the writer's inherent mad- 
ness. I queried the same possibility. It is 
amusing to see the flat contradictions. 
There is no sort of unanimity of opinion 
about any part of my complex character. 
One says a genius, another not a genius ; 
witty — dull; vivacious — dismal; intoler- 
ably sad —happy ; lewd — finicky ; " quiet 
humour " — " wild and vivacious wit.' As a 
whole, I am surprised and delighted with 
the extraordinary kindness and sympathy 
meted out to it, more than I deserve or it 
deserves, while one or two critics, with power 
that amazes, penetrate to the wretched Bar- 
bellion's core. To Mr. Massingham I feel 
I can only murmur, " Too kind, too kind," 
like the aged Florence Nightingale when they 
came to present her with the O.M. But 
what sympathetic understanding ! Compare 






140 A LAST DIARY 

one man who said I was a social climber ; 
another that I was " finicky " on sexual 
matters ( Ha ! ha ! ha ! pardon my homeric 
laughter); another — or was it the same? — 
that I shrank from life — yes, shrank ! Give 
me more life, to parody Goethe : I have 
shouted thus for years. Poor old reviewers I 
Friends and relatives say I have not drawn 
my real self But that's because I've taken 
my clothes off and they can't recognise 
me stark 1 The book is a self-portrait in 
the nude. 

May 1st, 1919. — What a sad, intractable 
world ! Will human love and goodness ever 
overcome it ? 

May 2nd, 1919. — I long to see my httle 
daughter again. Yet I fear it horribly, I am 
ashamed to meet her gaze. She will be 
frightened at me. Better she should have 
no memory of me at all to take through life. 

May 16th, 1919.— On the 14th at 2 p.m. 
a well-appointed ambulance took me to a 
nursing home at Eastbourne, where I arrived 
at 7 p.m., exhausted but cheerful. It was 



A LAST DIARY 141 

like being raised from the dead. We 
travelled via Acton and Ealing and Shep- 
herd's Bush, where we turned down H. road 
past my old rooms, across Kensington Road, 
and down Warwick Gardens, where one 
dark November night E. and I plighted our 
troth beneath a lamp-post. We passed the 
lamp-post ! Then to West Cromwell Road, 
to Fulham, Wandsworth, Tooting, to 
Tunbridge Wells, where at four-thirty we 
drew up at an inn and a servant-maid put a 
tray of tea and cakes on the bench beside 
me, and I ate and smoked while the driver 
in the road compared notes with the landlord 
on war adventures. 

" Where were you then ?" 

" Messines." 

" Ah ! I didn't go so far north as that." 

It was so hot, I lay on my couch with my 
rugs, etc., off. But the street boys were so 
curious over my pyjama suit, I pulled the 
blinds. Then they moved round and looked 
in through the door. Nurse closed it. 
They moved round to the other side, so 



142 A LAST DIARY 

Nurse drew those blinds too. Then they 
capered off. 

After that across Crowborough Forest, 
the car running at an even pace uphill and 
down. I lay happy and triumphant, and 
watched the country speeding by. We 
passed picnic parties someone should have 
given them a warning and an exhortation ; 
a dreadful thing for them, thought I, if they 
are not aware fully of their magnificent good 
fortune. The sky was cloudless. It was an 
amusing thing to me to feel so happy. Then 
1 became displeased at my mood, on E.'s 
account, as I recollected the picture of her 
and baby in the road waving me good- 
bye. 

3Iay 17th, 1919. — This egotism business: 
the Journal is more egoism than egotism, 
especially the latter part. And ought 
not Meredith to have called it " The 
Egotist " ? 

Maij 18th, 1919. — In the Journal I can 
see now that I made myself out worse than 
1 am, or was. I even took a morbid 



A LAST DIARY 143 

pleasure in intimating my depravity — self- 
mortification. If I had spoken out more 
plainly I should have escaped all this censure 
The reviewers are only too ready to take me 
at my word, which is but natural. I don't 
think on the whole my portrait of myself 
does myself justice. 

A beautiful morning. At the bottom of 
my bed two French windows open out on to 
the garden, where a blackbird is singing me 
something more than well. It is a magnifi- 
cent flute obligato to the tune in my heart 
going " thub-dup " " thub-dup " wildly as if 
I were a youth again in first love. He 
shouted out his song in the evening, the very 
moment I arrived here. What fine spirits 
these blackbirds are ! I listen to him and 
my withered carcase soaks up his song 
with a sighing sound, like a dry sponge 
taking up water. 



144 A LAST DIARY 



PoMPA Mortis 

May 20th, 1919. —If I could please myself, 
I should have my coffin made and kept 
under my bed. Then if I should die they 
could just pull the old box out and put me 
in it. It is the orthodox pompa mortis that 
makes death so ugly and terrible. I like the 
idea of William Morris, who was taken to 
the cemetery in an old farm- cart. 



Ludicrous Impotence 

I often laugh loud at the struggles of 
Nurse with my perfectly ludicrous, impotent 
body. If you saw us, you would certainly 
believe in a personal devil ; but when you 
saw what a devil he is, you would also see in 
him a most fantastic clown. JNIy right leg 
is almost completely aneesthetised — curious 
experience this. You could poke the fire 
with it, and I shouldn't feel anything out of 
the way. I could easily emulate Cranmer's 



A LAST DIARY 145 

stoical behaviour. It is so dead that if 
you put my body out in the sun, the flies in 
error would come and lay their eggs on me. 
Yes, Satan was the first and chiefest of Pan- 
taloons. Everyone who desires to possess 
a complete knowledge of the world should 
read Duhamel, Latzko, Barbusse, and con- 
sult the illustrations in a textbook of 
tropical medicine. 

The Idealist 

The ultimate detection of a few bad faults 
in a good man most unfairly discounts his 
goodness in the idealist's judgment. For 
the idealist can be a stern, implacable task- 
master. So a few good points unexpectedly 
coming to light in a bad man are enough to 
make the ever sanguine idealists forget the 
fellow's general badness. For the man of 
ideals must snatch at a straw. This is not 
justice, but it's human nature. 



146 A LAST DIARY 



Those Nurses Again 

Nurse No. 1 (helping her colleague to 
put away her books, examining a lapful). — 
Ah, French novels ! Tum-ti-tum-tum ! 

Nurse No. 2 (scandaUsed). — French 
classics I 

Nurse No. 1. — Oh, I beg your pardon — I 
thought they were French novels. 

May 22nd, 1919. — The reviewers say I 
am introspective — they mean self- intro- 
spective. I am really both. 

May 24/A, 1919.— My legs have to be 
tied down to the bed with a rope. A little 
girl staying here lends me her skipping rope. 

The Peace Treaty 

After those bright hopes of last autumn 
Justice will be done only when all power is 
vested in the people. Every liberal-minded 
man must feel the shame of it. 



A LAST DIARY 147 

This is the end. I am not going to keep 
a diary any more. 

The Brightest Thing in the World 

June 1st, 1919. — Rupert Brooke said the 
brightest thing in the world was a leaf with 
the sun shining on it. God pity his ignor- 
ance ! The brightest thing in the world is a 
Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. 
This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows 
about it save only the naturalist. I had a 
new sponge the other day and it smelt of 
the sea till I had soaked it. But what a 
vista that smell opened up ! — rock pools, 
gobies, blennies, anemones (crassicorn, dahlia 
— oh ! I forget). And at the end of my 
little excursion into memory I came upon 
the morning when I put some sanded, 
opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the 
sea into a glass collecting jar, and to my 
amazement and delight they turned into 
Ctenophors — alive, swimming, and irides- 
cent ! You must imagine a tiny soap 



148 A LAST DIARY 

bubble about the size of a filbert with four 
series of plates or combs* arranged regularly 
on the soap bubble from its north to its 
south pole, and flashing spasmodically in 
unison as they beat the water. 

June 3rd, 1919. — To-morrow I go to 
another nursing home. 

The rest is silence. 



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BILLING AND SONS, LTD., QUILDFOKD AND ESHER 



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